From their point of view

Google

This is a digital copy of a book that was preserved for generations on library shelves before it was carefully scanned by Google as part of a project

to make the world's books discoverable online.

It has survived long enough for the copyright to expire and the book to enter the public domain. A public domain book is one that was never subject

to copyright or whose legal copyright term has expired. Whether a book is in the public domain may vary country to country. Public domain books

are our gateways to the past, representing a wealth of history, culture and knowledge that's often difficult to discover.

Marks, notations and other maiginalia present in the original volume will appear in this file - a reminder of this book's long journey from the

publisher to a library and finally to you.

Usage guidelines

Google is proud to partner with libraries to digitize public domain materials and make them widely accessible. Public domain books belong to the
public and we are merely their custodians. Nevertheless, this work is expensive, so in order to keep providing tliis resource, we liave taken steps to
prevent abuse by commercial parties, including placing technical restrictions on automated querying.
We also ask that you:

+ Make non-commercial use of the files We designed Google Book Search for use by individuals, and we request that you use these files for
personal, non-commercial purposes.

+ Refrain fivm automated querying Do not send automated queries of any sort to Google's system: If you are conducting research on machine
translation, optical character recognition or other areas where access to a large amount of text is helpful, please contact us. We encourage the
use of public domain materials for these purposes and may be able to help.

+ Maintain attributionTht GoogXt "watermark" you see on each file is essential for in forming people about this project and helping them find
additional materials through Google Book Search. Please do not remove it.

+ Keep it legal Whatever your use, remember that you are responsible for ensuring that what you are doing is legal. Do not assume that just
because we believe a book is in the public domain for users in the United States, that the work is also in the public domain for users in other
countries. Whether a book is still in copyright varies from country to country, and we can't offer guidance on whether any specific use of
any specific book is allowed. Please do not assume that a book's appearance in Google Book Search means it can be used in any manner
anywhere in the world. Copyright infringement liabili^ can be quite severe.

About Google Book Search

Google's mission is to organize the world's information and to make it universally accessible and useful. Google Book Search helps readers
discover the world's books while helping authors and publishers reach new audiences. You can search through the full text of this book on the web

at |http: //books .google .com/I

«AB^^

FROM THEIR POINT

OF VIEW

BY

M. LOANE

AUTHOR OF
" THE queen's poor " " THE NEXT STREET BUT ONE "

ETC.

SECOND IMPRESSION

LONDON

EDWARD ARNOLD
41 & 43 MADDOX STREET, BOND STREET, W.

1908

All Rights Reserved

HV

.AS-

b

Thanks are due to the " Associated Newspapers " and
the " Northern Newspaper Syndicate ^^ for permission
to reprint articles which first appeared in their
columns.

188909

CONTENTS

^ I.
II.

IV.

V.

VI.

VII.

VIII.

IX.

X.

XL

XII.

inv.

The Manufacture op the Tramp .

Family Life among the Poor

Some Mental and Moral Characteristics op
THE Poor ....

Our Masters' Eulbrs

Some op the Causes op Inpant Mortality

The Working-Class Father

The Cost op Food ....

What is Charity? ....

The Practical Drawbacks op Small Farms

The Spending op the Superfluous

Why the Poor preper Town Life .

The Art op Repairing

Wasted Effort among the Poor .

Remedies for Existing Evils

piei
1

22

62
106
123
144
167
177
217
230
245
261
272
288

Y»

, <f ■ •

FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

I

The Manufacture of the Tramp

We hear much of the State encouragement of the
tramp, and of various economic causes for his ex-
nce and multiplication, but few people realise
to wtecfr-^^arge extent he is a purely domestic
manufactureT'^^wing to needless injuries inflicted
upon them by rough and ignorant handling,
innumerable boys are destined from the earliest
moments of their separate existence to nothing
better than the lowest forms of casual labour.

7 Others are handicapped by neglect of personal
defects, curable in eariy life but allowed to turn
into hopeless disabilities ; while many sujBFer from
unsuitable or insufficient feeding, which results in
general feebleness and that incapacity for sustained
attention or sustained physical ejBFort which

2 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

inevitably leads to poverty and seldom stops
short of pauperism. Others are ruined by parental
ignorance or greed, which permits them to under-
take heavy labour when they are only fit for light
and varied work. Many a lad, energetic, promising
ii;i character and physique, is practically beggared
from this cause before he is old enough to
understand his own interests. At fourteen he is
an eager worker, at sixteen he is anaemic and
distorted, at twenty he has given up the struggle
^^^ani is " on the roads."
,/^^X< And yet more are destined to become tramps
owing to general lack of moral training and the
too early and complete emancipation from parental
control, which crfben has its root in premature
wage-earning, even when of sums totally inadequate
for a chUd's support!^ In a district where it was
rare for any boy to be given a labour certificate
before the age of fourteen, I heard a father
remonstrated with by a working man of a superior
type for allowing his twelve-years-old son to smoke
cigarettes openly and constantly. "He pays for
'em ; I don't," was the only reply. It is extremely
doubtful whether the child's odd-time earnings
amounted to as much as ninepence a week. The
next time I met the little fellow, smoking and
alone (I had not believed in the genuineness of the
taste until then), I tried argument. He peered up

MANUFACTURE OF THE TRAMP 3

at me, blinking through the vile smoke, and said,
with an old-mannish air, "I couldn't get on
nohow without my baccy ! "

Owing chiefly to the extreme indulgence shown
by working-class parents to their children in early
life, and especially to the system of bribing them
to obedience when their wiHuhiess becomes
intolerable, many of them are completely unable
to control their boys by the time they are twelve
or fourteen, and are obliged to stand by and see
them ignorantly ruin all their prospects in life.

I have known fathers able^willing, and anxious
to apprentice their sons to good trades, and the
lads have obstinately declined, coveting the
precocious independence of an errand boy, or some
equivalent occupation leading to nothing. I have
known others who have paid the premium for

^.^aggrenticeship, and managed to keep the boys at
the work for six months or a year, and then they
have broken away and flatly declined all employ-
ment but what their parents call "just enough to
keep them oJ0F the roads." I recollect one whose
parents succeeded in getting him through his
apprenticeship, but directly the term was completed

V. Kfes took a situation as a groom in a most undesirable
establishment, got into trouble, disappeared, and
enlisted, but is far too undisciplined to have the
faintest likelihood of rising from the ranks.

4 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

Obedience, like the King's English, can only be
learnt in early childhood.

In a very few years' time the attitude of these
boys towards their parents will probably be that
of an undergraduate whom I heard ask his mother
reproachfully, " Why didn't you have me taught
music when I was a kid ? " "I tried to, my dear,
but you disliked it so much that I gave it up. You
simply wouldn't learn." ** Why didn't you smack
me tiU I did ? "

The tramp becomes extraordinarily plausible,
and if young will often impose upon even the
most experienced persons. I was given a somewhat
ludicrous instance of this by near relatives of the
boy in question. His age was fourteen, he was
the son of a well-to-do tenant farmer, and had been
a boarder at the County Grammar School for four
years, when he ran away and joined fortunes with
a London crossing-sweeper, who had never had an
hour's instruction and who had been living by his
wits almost as far back as his memory reached.
The union did not prosper, and, via magistrate and
police-court missionary, they found themselves on
board a training ship supported by voluntary
contributions. The crossing-sweeper, a clever lad,
eagerly grasping his first real chance, made rapid
p4i'm LLg and writing ; but the r.t.'.t
which he acquired these and other arts was slow

MANUFACTURE OF THE TRAMP 5

indeed when compared with that of the grammar-
school boy, who had professed to be equally
illiterate. At first everyone was delighted by his
intelligence, but stimulated and excited by praise,
the lad presently forgot all caution, and " learnt "
at such a rate ,that the chaplain's suspicions were
aroused, and after a lengthy interview he extorted
the addresses of the neglected orphan's parents
«d .ohoclM^tcr. From the potot of ^w of
plain honesty, I cannot profess to understand the
course that the chaplain then took : he advised
the parents to allow the lad to remain where he
was, and they did so. He afterwards attained
a position as good as his father's, and probably
to this day he figures, under the disguise of initials
and stars, as a stimulating example to tardy
subscribers " of what can be done with even the
apparently hopeless wastrel of a London slum."

Not only the boys are allowed to throw away
all their opportunities by this unchecked wilfulness
and impatience of control ; I could give numberless
instances of girls permitted tp do the same. In
their case the first result is weakened health, and
the ultimate result to many is something still
worse. A year ago a lady required an extra
servant for light household duties, and chose a fine,
strong, well-grown girl of fifteen, whose parents
were extremely poor and had a large dependent

\

6 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

family. Some weeks before this the mother,
finding the girl very troublesome, had bribed her
to good behaviour by promising her a two-days'
visit to some relatives who lived in a town thirty
miles oflF. The time fixed for the treat fell due
when she had been one day in her place, and
nothing would induce her to postpone the pleasure,
though the mother even oflFered her a new Sunday
dress if she would yield. The mistress recognised
that fifteen years of indulgence cannot be brought
to a dead stop in a moment, and allowed the girl
to go, trusting that she would then settle down ;
but fresh whims soon arose, and she had to send
her away. The father suddenly rebelled against
supporting a daughter of that age and strength,
and gave the mother a week in which to get her a
place. At such short notice only a very inferior
one could be found, and the girFs whole prospects
were spoilt.

An excellent place was found for a splendidly
strong and healthy girl of sixteen. Father, mother,
and eldest sister all tried in vain to bribe and
persuade her to accept it. She refused, and found
a situation for herself, where her health broke down
in three months. She returned home for a long
rest, and then, in direct opposition to her parents'
wishes, went to a lodging-house. It was by no
means a sensationally bad place, as she was well fed

MANUFACTURE OF THE TRAMP 7

and well housed, but it achieved the ruin of her
health.

No one can deny that it is difficult to control
children, and particularly difficult for the poor,
owing to several of the circumstances of their daily
lives, but it is by no means impossible. Quite
close to these girls lived another large family, and
until they were well above twenty neither son nor
daughter was allowed either to take a situation
without their parents' full consent or to give it
up without their knowledge and permission. If
they ventured to give notice on their own account,
they were sent back at once with an apology and
a request that the notice might be retracted. "No
more harshness had been exercised in this family
than in the others ; in fact, harshness as a system
breaks down quite as early as bribery, if not earlier.
The difference of method and result arose simply
from the fact that in one household the parents
recognised that it was their duty to protect young
people against their own folly, and in the others
they did not. The mother's leading principle of
education was, "Whatever you undertake to do,
you must go on doing, however tired of it you may
be," and the measure that she exacted from her
children she poured out on them in full abundance.
Also she was in the habit of sending off the more
troublesome ones to school with the warning :

8 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

*'Now, however much the schoolmaster beats you,
don't expect me to come and ask him why he did
it. I shall only think that you have had about
half as much as you deserve." He was rather a
severe man, but they suflfered far less at his
hands than did the sons of outwardly sympathetic
mothers.

In the general training of children, it must
always be remembered that rooted unwillingness
to use the intellect is far more common than Seer
physical laziness, and is a more disastrous quaUty.
A person may by nature dislike all muscular effort,
or from constitutional reasons may find muscular
effort peculiarly costly, and yet if recognising its
necessity and wisely economising it, may accom-
plish far^jotuisthan the "willing worker. Fast
■"WSlKerwith twotons.'^ More men are tramps,
and more women are miserable housewives if
married, or underpaid slaves if single, because they
cannot, or will not, use their brain power, than
because they are too lazy for hard bodily labour.
The amount of purely unintellectual drudgery
diminishes every year, and the demand for
inteiKgent workers increases.'

I had one woman patient, a chronic suflFerer, who
managed to keep house and children in far more
perfect order than vigorous neighbours always
^crubbin^, and mopping, and scouring. I asked her

MANUFACTURE OF THE TRAMP 9

how she managed to do this, and she replied, " I
makes my mind do three parts of it. It isn't so
much what I does, but what I stops from having
to be did." The words of a middle-class mistress
no doubt explain what the woman meant : " I
have such a nice, sensible servant now. The last
was very good-natured and hard-working, but she
would leave a bucket of dirty water on the stairs,
tumble over it, spend half an hour cleaning up the
mess, and then exclaim, * Dear me ! What a lot
of work there is in this house, to be sure ! ' "

Mental laziness and inertia, combined with a fair
amount of physical industry, are to be found in
both sexes and in all classes, and the fact needs to
be recognised and combated by educationists. I-
have had probationers " well born, well bred, and
moderately learned," who greatiy preferred scrub-
bing mackintoshes and polishing brasses and tins to
leading their strictly professioL duties. Almost
in vain I preached : " Unless you mean to study
seriously, unless you intend to give your patients
the most perfect care possible, and prepare your-
selves at least to undertake the organisation and
management of a ward, what right have you to be
here ? At scrubbing and polishing you wiU never
be worth as much as a charwoman, and it is a lucky
charwoman who earns twelve shillings a week all
the year through."

lo FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

I am told that on board merchant ships there is
great difficulty in keeping apprentices from attend-
ing exclusively to the roughest and hardest part of
their duties. They like to boast that they can
take a seaman's place and are smart in their work
aloft, and fail to understand that by the time
they are five-and-twenty they will find that un-
educated lads of eighteen or nineteen can do all that
kind of thing as well as they, or better.

The captain of an ocean liner told me that
during a voyage that lasted over a month the
discarded younger son of an English duke had
peeled potatoes for the first-class passengers' cook
in return for a better breakfast than was provided
in the steerage. Drunkards and gamblers are never
solicitous about their breakfast. Sheer laziness had
been his ruin ; but it was mental, not physical.

I have several times discovered steady, hard-
working girls ground down to ceaseless drudgery. I
have found them lighter and better places ; but the
mental strain of being expected to do the smaller
amount of work really well was so great that in a
short time they thankfully returned to their former
condition. " When there is no work to do, she
does not do it ; and when there is, I have to do
it myself," explained a young mistress lucidly,
astonished that no servant appreciated her high
wages, light work, and early hours, when saddled

MANUFACTURE OF THE TRAMP ii

with the intolerable drawback of being expected
" to think wliat she is doing."

During a prolonged " silly season " a daily paper
filled many columns with letters on the domestic-
servant problem. There was one oasis of good
sense in which a mistress described the virtues and
failings of the average servant. The first lieu-
tenant of a very large ship read the letter through
carefully, and then said emphatically, " Every single
thing that she says is equally true of bluejackets.
Hard work, dirty work, unhealthy work, dangerous
work, needless work, and they come up smiling ;
ask them to think, or to carry out a complicated
routine, and they^loathe it."

Excessive indulgence of children does not even
cease with childhood or early youth. A few days
ago in a country village, where wages are low and
the necessaries of life by no means cheap, I asked,
" Who is that man that he can afibrd to get drunk
every night ? Where does he work ? " " Oh, he
don't work anywheres. His wife do keep him.
She is an industrious woman, always at it from
the first thing in the morning." " She must be a
very foolish person if she supplies him with drink."
" Oh, his mother do give him that"
~*\ One of the social causes for the multiplication o]
tramps is the mistaken preference of short-sighted
employers for " cheap labour," or rather by their con-

12 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

founding that with low-priced labour. Another is
the fact that so many people just above the poverty
line have no realisation of the burden thrown upon
the community by the existence of such a large and
almost entirely unproductive class, and encourage
its increase and continuance by their readily
bestowed alms ; while the spasmodic charity of those
above them in station, and presumably in oppor-
tunities of education, is still more to be blamed.
Opponents of literary education and the
** educational ladder" are inclined to look upon
Council schools as the fruitful parent of tramps.
It must be owned that literary education postpones
the age of usefulness, but this is a temporary eflFect,
amply compensated for later on. One of the
most practically ignorant boys I ever had to deal
with had remained at school until he was fourteen
and was in the 7 th Standard. Although he had
lived in the country all his life and both his grand-
fathers were experienced gardeners, he could not dig,
or weed, or cut grass, or plant potatoes, or sow seeds.
He professed to like horses, but could not groom or
saddle a pony, wash out a stable, or clean harness.
^D^-wSs the eldest of the family, and could not clean
boots or knives. The ineptitude of the way he
set about his work is simply inconceivable. One
day he was told to beat a carpet measuring 15x8
and rather heavy for its size. He tied a rope to a

MANUFACTURE OF THE TRAMP 13

tree, slipped the rope under the carpet lengthwise,
and then wasted twenty minutes trying to tie the
loose end of the rope to a second tree with the
full weight of the carpet dragging on his arms.
Nevertheless, in six months' time he was getting
ten shillings a week, and was fairly well worth the
money.

I too object to free secondary education, but
on different grounds from those commonly brought
forward. Whose feet are most likely to be placed
upon the rungs of the * * educational ladder ? " Those
of the well-fed, well -clothed, well -housed child,
whose parents could easily afford to pay the full
cost of his training. In a village where farmers'
sons up to the age of twelve or thirteen attended
the Council school, I asked an old resident where
they were sent later on. ** Oh, they generally go to
B. for three or four years, or sometimes to G.,"
naming two grammar schools, the second one
being of no small celebrity. A few days later I
heard local rejoicings over the honour done to the
village, and especially to the village schoolmaster,
by a boy who had won a scholarship worth nearly
£100. With fragments of Gray's " Elegy " floating
through my mind, and doubtful whether or not
nous avons chang6 tout cela, I made inquiries,
and found that the lad was the eldest child of the
most prosperous farmer in the district. "There's

14 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

always something to be had nowadays if youVe
got the leamin'," an elderly relative who was ** living
up" very comfortably told me triumphantly, and
then broke off to relate how the. boy's uncle had
died " worth a pretty penny," and how much his
father paid yearly to the railway for carriage of
goods. A few weeks before, the old gentleman, in
a more pessimistic frame of mind, had protested
earnestly, '* There's so much talk of edjucation,
but I don't see what diffrince it do make. Nine
years I were on the School Board. No ; boys is
pretty much what they was." " But at least they
are not worse?" "No, no; there isn't a bit of
wickedness in 'em but what I can remember in
myself I just lived for destruction and mistiful-
ness. Boys have no hearts at all. They're made
like it, and edjucation don't make no diffrince."

Free studentships : appear to be awarded in an
equally strange fashion. "She is idle, and she
does not seem specially capable. How did she
get the studentship?" I heard a young teacher
at a technical school ask her senior. In purely
explanatory tones, without the faintest trace of
criticism, sarcasm, or displeasure, the latter replied,
" Oh, two of her brothers had been free students."
Whether the free students suffered from poverty
of food, or from previous over-eiertion, I cannot
say, but half an hour's observation would have

MANUFACTURE OF THE TRAMP 15

been suflficient to enable any stranger to distinguish
them from the paying pupils.

The great fault of the religious and moral
education provided for the poor, and at least
equally the fault of that provided by themselves,
is that- it fosters weak-kneed apathy under the
name of submission to the will of God. The result
of this teaching is shown in aU adverse circum-
stances, but especially in the treatment of the
sick. I come across countless perfectly respectable
households where, if a patient is once recognised
to be seriously ill, all efforts for cure or alleviation
not merely flag, but are regarded as impious.
Submission, even if only to the ordinance of man,
has its place in life, and a very large one ; but for
fifty years at least it would be safe to extol almost
exclusively the virtues of courage, family pride, and
unbending determination.

That civility has any necessary connection with
respectability is an error leading to much hypoc-
risy and misdirection of charitable and even State
assistance. The glib tongue, and the plausible tale,
and the smooth manner still bring in a fine harvest
to their owners. A lady constantly visiting the
homes of the poor in a large manufacturing town
one winter when there were many " unemployed "
and large sums were collected for them, said to me,
" The real unemployed, decent, steady men doing

!

i
1 6 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW ;

the best they can for their families, will not apply ]
for relief, because they are ashamed to be seen in
such society. While they are searching hopelessly ^
for work, or crouching in their bare homes half
starved, loafers and drunkards, and worse, are^
spinning romances and swallowing up all that the
charitable public intended for respectable toilers in
passing distress."

Owing to the State encouragement of tramps,
the strong man looking for work is simply swamped
among the crowd of those who cannot work, or
cannot work continuously, those who do not know
how, and those who will not. Six years ago a man
begged employment at an upland farm, and pro-
tested that he had walked 180 miles on the high
road, and had asked for work at every likely house
he had passed, but entirely in vain. The farmer
had heard many similar tales, and did not for one
instant believe him, but was thankful to have a
labourer even if it should only be for a couple of
days. At the end of four years, the latest news
that I have of him, that man was still in the
farmer's employ. '

The isolated tramp of mature age must always i
be difl&cult to deal with because he lacks the
principal springs of action, but a considerable
proportion of those who are still young, and
especially groups who are related to one another :

MANUFACTURE OF THE TRAMP 17

and have retained enough family feeling to stick
together in all their wanderings, could probably be
restored to the life of ordinary householders if help
of the right kind were given. Eighteen months
ago, my attention, though blunted by the sight
of a daily average of fifty or sixty tramps and
travellers, was attracted by a party which evidently
formed one family. The father, a tall, strong man
in the prime of life, led the way, carrying a large
bundle ; a lad carried a child of three on his back ;
a girl wheeled a perambulator containing a baby of
under two and a few miscellaneous possessions ; and
a dark-eyed, alert-looking woman brought up the
rear with two footsore little girls. None of them
were in rags, but their clothes all had the unmis-
takable all-over-alike tint quickly taken by poor
materials alternately exposed to rain and sun.
Their voices were clear, and they talked freely to
one another, whereas the professional tramp has
a perennial cold in his throat, a chronic depression,
and speaks little except for the purpose of begging.
Six hours after they passed me, they attempted
to enter a large town, and were stopped by an
Inspector of the National Society for the Prevention
of Cruelty to Children. In ten seconds he was
convinced that they were "out of the ordinary
line," and in ten minutes he had learnt their
history. The man was a miner, thrown out of

1 8 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

work by a fierce and obstinate strike in the
inception and conduct of which he had had little
more voice than his youngest child. He lived in
a cottage owned by the proprietors of the mine,f
and received a week's notice to quit. No other
house could be obtained ; he sold the furniture for
what he could get, and went into lodgings. At a
time when their chndren range from ten months to
fifteen years of age, few workmen have any savings
worth naming: The entire resources of the family
were exhausted in eight weeks, and they set out,
all together, in search of work. They had been
" on the roads " for twelve months, working when
and how they could, begging the rest of their
subsistence, and in fine weather sleeping out of
doors.

The Inspector tried to get the whole party
lodged at the workhouse while he considered what
could be done, but for some obscure departmental
reason his request was refused. He had no fundd
at his disposal, but finding that his clients were
Roman Catholics, he applied to two priests, who
gave him twelve and sixpence, and an Anglican
contributed half a crown and some much-needed
clothing, and made promises of further help in the
way of furniture " if something definite " could be
done, and he took lodgings for them for the night andj
provided a substantial supper. Early next xaoim

MANUFACTURE OF THE TRAMP 19

ing he visited them, and thought it a good augury
when he found them all dressed and the children
washed and " put straight." He gave the man a
note to a large employer of labour living eleven
miles away, and gave the woman half a crown to
buy food. The man started off at once, with a
piece of bread in his pocket, and the woman,
"seeing that they had all had a good supper,"
spent the money on a basket of fish, which she
succeeded in retailing for five shillings. The
husband waited eight hours to see the master, and
then returned faint with hunger and fatigue, but
with permission to begin work in three days' time.
Inspirited by these specimens of "grit," the
Inspector secured a small cottage near the factory,
begged all the strictly necessary articles of fur-
niture, and " went bail " for the family at a decent
general shop. Paying a surprise visit a few weeks
later, he was gratified to find the house clean and
tidy, the children at school, and the two elder
ones at work, and to receive the woman's joyful
assurance, " We're not a penny in debt, and we're
getting a nice home together again."

It is easy to declaim against the criminal
recklessness of taking six children on the tramp,
but more might be said for the family feeling
which prompted such a step, and for the parental
care which, all through that long year of hardship

20 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

and exposure, had managed to keep them in health
and decency, and in such a frame of mind that
they had all returned to normal life without the
smallest conscious eflFort.

The only sad and embittered workers that I
find among the poor are unskilled labourers who
are beginning to lose their strength and to realise
that there is nothing before them to the end of
their days but drudgery, which every added year
makes more painful, and galling subordination to
the class immediately above them. ''At what
time do the men come to work ? " I asked a lad
in a builder's yard. "The gentlemen come at
eight and go at five. The others come at seven
and go at six, because they've got to clear away
and to get things ready." In cases where they
work regularly together, the relations between the
smart young artisan and the toil-worn labourer are ,
sometimes of an unceremoniously filial nature, but
for a man of fifty or more to be at the beck and
call of one possibly less than half his age can
rarely be anything but a conscious humiliation,
and it is felt more deeply when, as is often the
case, the labourer belongs by birth and connections
to the superior class, and feels that "by rights"
he too should have been "given a trade."

Heaven, we are told, is a state of mind, not a .
locality, and poverty or riches, as a lasting ;

MANUFACTURE OF THE TRAMP 21

condition, ultimately depend upon disciplined or un-
disciplined character and certain mental abilities,
above all upon the power of imaginative foresight.

Thp. t ypP. of mind ±hi. iU.uidR to pmipP.iH.m ir t/. be

found in every class, and so is that which leads

standard of life and general thriftiness was high,
I found a jocular saying current among the
cottagers when anyone was suspected of the
intention to sacrifice a substantial advantage
for a trivial immediate gain, "Oh, you can sell
the springs for eighteenpence." The words had
originally been uttered by a young married woman
who had chopped up a good sofa and used it for
firing in preference to begging, borrowing, buying
on credit, or going without, four pennyworth of
coal.

II

Family Life among the Poor

The highest type of home training among the
poor, its strong and its weak points, have nowhere
been better described than in Sartor Resartus.
" If good Passivity alone, and not good Passivity
and good Activity together, were the thing wanted,
then was my early position favourable beyond
the most. ... On the other side, however, things
went not so well. My Active Power was unfavour-
ably hemmed in, of which misfortune how many
traces yet abide with me ! In an ordinary house,
where the litter of children's sports is hateful
enough, your training is too stoical; rather to
bear and forbear than to make and do. I was
forbid much : wishes in any measure bold I had to
renounce. ... It was too rigorous, too frugal,
compressively secluded, every way unscientific.
Yet in that very strictness and domestic solitude
might there not lie the root of deeper earnestness,
of the stem from which all noble fruit must grow.

aa

FAMILY LIFE AMONG THE POOR 23

Above all, how unskilful soever, it was loving, it
was well-meant, honest ; whereby every deficiency
was helped." For the tender and just memory
of actualities shown in these few sentences, the
author may well be forgiven innumerable pages of
empty rant. Adam Smith, in words as applicable
to the present day as to the period when they
were written, justifies on practical grounds the
austere code of morality on which these homes
are based : "A single week's thoughtlessness and
dissipation is often sufficient to undo a poor
workman for ever."

Homes such as Carlyle pictured are to be found
among superior wage-earners of all descriptions,
from the dockyard-man and the agricultural
labourer up to the foreman getting perhaps as
much as two hundred a year. One great drawback
to the rigidity of the system is that if it fails with
individual members of the family, it fails very badly
indeed; and another is the extreme isolation in
which such households live and the general
unneighbourliness of their conduct, unless they
should happen to belong to some evangelical and
militant sect. The chief virtue that can be shown
by lads and lasses at school or in workshops is not,
" They choose their friends well," but ** They never
pick up with no one."

A mother of this type was relating to me the

24 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

life and death of a son who had died about ten
years previously, aged nine, and the culminating
point of her eulogy was, " He always kep' to hisself.
He never bringed no boys round the house." Poor
little soul ! he must at least have had his moments
of imaginative rebellion, for the sin of his life, from
his mother's standpoint, was his telling her once —
once only ! — that he "would go for a soldier."

In these homes there is often an extreme narrow-
ness of outlook, and the members are not seldom
as indifferent to public affairs as the donkey in the
fable who refused to run away when told that the
enemy were in sight. On my telling her of a
great national disaster, a woman asked in all
seriousness, " Will it do any harm to me, miss ?
Then why should I care?" Less austerely re-
spectable persons often possess wider sympathies,
and are socially of more value. " If our virtues
did not go forth of us, 'twere all alike as if we had
them not."

On the whole, the homes of the poor owe most
to the mother, but some children would fare
badly indeed if it were not for their fathers
constant protection. I do not mean protection
against a bad mother, — for there a man is practi-
cally more helpless than a woman who has given
her children a bad father, — but protection against
a careless one. A minister's wife in the north of

FAMILY LIFE AMONG THE POOR 25

England told me that she was passing a work-
man's house one afternoon and heard such a
shrill and persistent wail of, " What '11 Willy say ?
Oh — h — ! " that she opened the door and walked
in. Mother and grandmother sat helplessly wring-
ing their hands, and lying motionless on the stone
floor in a pool of water was something that in
colour and shape looked like an enormous rat. It
was the eighteen-months-old baby, which, while the
clothes were being hung out in the back garden,
had fallen into a huge tub of dirty water. To all
appearance it was dead, but the minister's wife
sent for a doctor, and with no assistance but the
continued wail, *' What'U Willy say ? " stripped off"
the sodden clothing and set to work to try and
restore respiration and circulation ; and in two
hours' time the child was sitting up, pale and
exhausted, but otherwise little the worse for its
sufferings. She gathered that the absent Willy
had frequently had cause to "say" a great deal,
and, in spite of tearful entreaties, hardened her
heart sufficiently to leave the two negligent
guardians with the threat that unless they told
him that night what had happened, she should
tell him herself the next morning.

The lion does not paint the picture, and the
men of the wage-earning classes suffer under the
general imputation of being bad husbands and

26 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

fathers, a character only true of a minority among
them, and a continuaUy decreasing minority. Not
long ago an almost middle-aged doctor told me,
as if it were a never-before-heard-of thing, " Just
imagine what a good fellow that Simpson is. He
always lights the fire and gets his own breakfast
before he goes to work."

The usual course, when the husband has to start
earlier than seven to his work and there are
young children, is that, in addition to attending
to his own wants, he should carry up a cup of tea
to his wife, and put the big family kettle on, so
that there will be plenty of hot water by the time
she comes downstairs. The husband is rarely
relieved from this duty until he has a son or a
daughter old enough to take his place, and not
always then. I accidentally found out, however,
that one little girl of barely nine was expected
to prepare breakfast for her father at 6.30 even
in the winter. " I can't read the clock," she told
me, "but father showed me the way the hands
is when it's time to get up and light the fire."
It was an indication of unusually harsh treatment :
many far more serious matters soon came to the
knowledge of the neighbours, and ultimately she
had to be removed from the custody of her
parents, a step that can only 'be justified in
extreme cases.

FAMILY LIFE AMONG THE POOR 27

Few indeed are the homes where a child does
not lead a happier and more natural life, and has
not a better chance of turning into a normal
human being, fitted to take a brave part in the
world as it is, and as it is very likely to remain,
than in any institution that has yet been seen.
Before aiming a single blow at home life, let us
consider the matter, and ask. What have we to put
in its place ? Has the State been so successful as
foster-mother to orphan, deserted, and "criminal"
children, that she is justified in wishing to displace
any but the lowest and worst of parents ?

A woman whose age is now very little over
thirty gave me a most pathetic account of her
life in one of the workhouse barrack-schools, and the
grief caused her by the sudden and entire separa-
tion from her two younger brothers. The children
had frequently risked, and sometimes incurred,
severe corporal punishment by speaking to one
another through some railings which divided the
boys' part of the building from the girls'. Need-
less to say, the rule that they broke had been
made for other reasons than the desire to separate
orphan brothers and sisters aged eleven, nine, and
seven ; but it is the kind of thing that happens
when human lives are regulated on a large scale
and by persons capable of remarking, as one man
did to whom I related the tale, " Of course there

28 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

ought to have been a solid wall."* " But it was
better before we left, much better," she concluded
simply ; " brothers and sisters could meet once a
month."

However well State or charitable homes may-
begin, they all slip into institutionalism. I
remember one which in ten years sank from a
place where the children as far as possible lived
the same life as among superior cottagers — Whelped
in the house work, minded the baby, were sent on
errands to the shops, and ran to school chattering
and laughing with their little neighbours — into
one where no child under twelve did a stroke of
work and those under fifteen did very little, and
where the girls were compelled to walk to school
two and two in absolute silence, and were caned
before the whole house if they were convicted of
exchanging a single word on the road. As to
the value of the superintendence exercised by
the Committee, it was so perfunctory that a con-
firmed drunkard was in charge of the Home for
a considerable period, her habits being concealed
by the exertions of her assistant and by the
strange loyalty that children will show to almost
anyone who is not systematically unkind to them.
At last a widower father, who had been induced
to pay five shillings a week in order that his little
daughter might be "properly taught and looked

FAMILY LIFE AMONG THE POOR 29

after," called at the house while the assistant was
out and asked to see the matron. The frightened
child who answered the door declared that no one
was in. " Nonsense ! " said the man. " Thirty
young girls can't be left alone in a house; and
if they are, they didn't ought to be." He
marched into the sitting-room, and found the
matron lying on the floor speechlessly drunk.
Naturally, he went straight to the Secretary, and
there was a general exposure and more careful
inspection, but no radical alteration in the system.

In another "Home," where the children were
" specially trained for domestic service," the sisters,
women of gentle birth and breeding, cleaned their
own boots, and their pupils (most of whom had
been with them from infancy) were sent out into
the world so entirely ignorant' of any of the
conventional differences between the treatment of
mistress and maid that one of them, having been
shown silver fish knives and forks and told to
place them on the dining-room table, immediately
laid them in the kitchen also for herself and her
fellow-servant.

Intense selfishness is fostered by institutional
life; the afiections are in no way drawn out
or trained, and are in danger of withering away.
A teacher at a large school for fatherless girls
told me : " The children have everything they

30 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

can possibly want, and are far better fed than
in the majority of middle-class schools ; and they
know, because most of them go home for their
holidays, that their mothers have to work hard
y ind count every penny ; and yet scarcely a letter
y passes through my hands in which the girls do
not beg for money — ^which is generally sent."
She also complained that friendship, and loyalty,
and all desire to protect one another were extremely
rare among them, and said that the following
story is characteristic of their usual conduct. A
girl of eleven, who had been noisy and troublesome,
was locked by herself in the day-room while the
rest of her class were marshalled to their dormitory.
The teacher intended fetching her in a quarter
of an hour, but forgot all about it, and as she
slept in another room, and had only taken charge
during the temporary absence of the children's
real mistress, there was nothing to remind her
of the occurrence. When the absent teacher
returned at 9.30 and went to the dormitory she
did not miss the child, and turned the lights out
as usual. All the girls knew that one of their
number, and almost the youngest, was left alone
in the day-room, but none of them spoke. They
disliked the teacher who had given the punish-
ment, and were far more anxious to get her into
trouble with the superintendent than to rescue

FAMILY LIFE AMONG THE POOR 31

their little companion from cold, and darkness,
and possible terror. Happily, the child was free
from nerves, had rolled herself up in the table-
cloth, and slept peacefully all night. Attempts
were made to convince five or six of the elder
girls that they had behaved with mean spiteful-
ness and great cruelty, but they seemed entirely
conscienceless because without natural affection.
Children can only proceed from the particular
to the general ; they must realise the pain of
hurting those they love before they can rise to
any conception of their duty to their neighbours
as a whole.

Even when many years have been spent in
more normal surroundings, the average child is
quickly tainted by the prevailing spirit of shirking
and selfishness. A girl of twelve, who had been
boarded out in the country for a considerable
time, was then sent to a town Home, to remain
there until she was ready for service. I asked
her if she had been sorry to leave the country,
and she replied with fervour, " Oh, I like the
'Ome much best!" **I thought most little girls
loved the country. Were not the people kind
to you ? " "Oh yes, but at the 'Ome you don't
have to do no work."

Often one reads in the printed reports of schools
and refuges, " Ninety-five per cent, of the children

32 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

bear excellent characters." Considered exclusively
as individual workers this may be true, though
I remember being told by a person who had
unwillingly signed «ome such statement, " All the
boys who die and aU who disappear are put on
the credit side of the sheet." But the complete
test of fitness for life does not come until they
are heads of households. Will they have a genius
for family life? — ^for they have certainly no ex-
perience to guide them. If a boy from a work-
house school married a girl from an orphanage,
the menage would excite the curiosity of a
James the First

If we really loved justice, we should be no
more anxious to take other people's responsibilities
upon our shoulders than to fling our peculiar
burdens upon the first weakly charitable person
we met. I have always tried to work upon the
principle of family responsibility, and have carried
it out with regard to the most distant members
when necessary. I once attended at a house
where the youngest child, aged seven, had a bad
attack of enteric fever. The mother was poor,
but most anxious to do everything that she could
without resort to charity. I asked her to buy
a mackintosh sheet, and told her that the price
would be 3s. 6d. Lines of anxiety appeared
on her face, for the amount was between a fifth

FAMILY LIFE AMONG THE POOR 33

and a sixth of the week's wages. "How many
brothers and sisters have you in this town?"
I inquired. " Seven," was the totally unexpected
reply, for she was past forty-five, and the popula-
tion as a whole shifted rapidly. "Suppose you
ask each of them to give you sixpence ? I am
sure they will not refuse if you explain what
a benefit it will be to their little niece, and how
much it will lighten your own labour." In
thirty-six hours the mackintosh was bought and
paid for, and a very wide circle had learnt its
cost and its value as a nursing accessory, while
the mother had been comforted and gratified by ^
the readiness of her own relatives to help her
in a time of exceptional need.

The most essential drawback to emigration, and
even migration, is the injury done to family life.
In a recent book. At the Works , the writer seems
to be of opinion that a family is necessarily limited
to one household, and that every married woman
who cannot aflFord paid service for herself and^ her
infant children has nothing to depend upon when
incapacitated by illness but the charity of the
upper classes. I have known towns whfere family
life embraced six or more households, and services
of all kinds were constantly and freely inter-
changed. Was it washing-day at Aunt Susans?
Very well, the children repaired to Aunt Mary
3

/

/

34 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW I

at dinner-time with no further explanation than
"Mother's busy, and we're so hungry." Was
Uncle Tom convalescing, " and that arritable the
boys darsn't come a-nigh him"? Then grand-
mother would have them "and welcome." Even
in towns such as described by Lady Bell friend-
ships are soon formed that are scarcely less fruit-
ful in kindness than blood relationships. Even the
most undesirable neighbour, whose house half the
women in the street have vowed — with good reason
— never to enter again, has no lack of help when
the hour of stress arrives. In fact, the only persons
I have ever found lonely or deserted are the too
rigidly exclusive and " stand-offish." They, indeed,
may " perish in their pride " while kindly neighbours
hold urgency meetings not ten yards away, each
trying to induce the other to "put herself
forward," and no one among them having sufficient
courage to break down invisible barriers.

Like the rich, but to a less degree, the poor waste
nearly half the strength and sweetness of family
life by a tendency to ignore all relationships but
those on the mother's side — a tendency, by the
way, which in all classes of life may be curiously
modified by the indirect results of the Deceased
Wife's Sister's Bill.

Too much pity is often expended on poor women
because they have to do house work when they are

FAMILY LIFE AMONG THE POOR 35

ill ; but in these circumstances the average husband
will. always do the roughest part of it, besides
lowering his usually modest demands as to cooking,
cleanliness, and punctuality. With regard to the
remainder of the work, it is a blessing in very
transparent disguise ; no woman is so much to be
pitied as the one who, ailing in health and unculti-
vated in mind, is set free from all necessity for
manual labour.

Even a well-built and comfortably arranged
house often injuriously affects the health of women
not educated up to the point of benefiting by it.
To have to open her kitchen door fifty times a day
in all weathers and walk five steps in the open
air to her wash-house may be a real advantage to
the woman who never dreams of going for a walk.
The darkness of many cottage living-rooms compels
people to sit with open doors who would not open
a window, and I have heard that when properly
built walls and roofs were first supplied in certain
villages in Scotland, the immediate result was a
terrible increase of consumption. We rashly forget
that society is a living organism of almost infinite
complexity, and that a change of surroundings
demands a corresponding change in habits.

One of the incidental advantages of early
marriages is that the grandparents are still com-
paratively young and strong; not only do they

36 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

J

need no help from their children, but can give them
a great deal of valuable assistance. Within an
hour I was speaking to two very poor women. One
said regretfully, " I couldn't never do as much for
my children as I should of liked, 'specially in the
way of taking of them out o' doors. You see, my
mother died not long after I was married. She
was over forty when I was born, so it was much the
same tale with her ; but then she on'y had me and
my two brothers, so it didn't seem to matter so
much. And then father was a much handier man
in the house than what my husband is." The other,
resentful of some chance criticism, said angrily,
" It's all very well for Mrs. Cripps to talk of what
she does. She's got a mother to help her, and a
sister, and her old father will mind her little boys
by the hour when he's down at the allotments."

Lady Bell had also picked up a curiously in-
accurate idea that an old father is a more welcome
inmate of his mamed children's house than an old
mother, and that it is because he is less critical and
captious and easier to get on with. As a matter of
fact, no one has his critical faculties more sharpened
and is more relentless and unrestrained in the ex-
pression of his judgments than an unoccupied old
man. If either parent is welcome in the house, it
is the mother ; and in most cases I fear that the
wife would prefer the constant presence of her

FAMILY LIFE AMONG THE POOR 37

mother-in-law to that of her aged father. This is
not only because the woman is less exacting and
makes less work, and even if in feeble health can
give household help in a hundred smaU ways ; it is
because of the intolerance that often exists between
one generation and another when domestic manners
and customs are changing as rapidly as they are at
the present d*y among the progre^ive working
classes, and because a woman adapts herself more
readily and is never left so far behind in the
struggle for morality and refinement. It is not a
mere aping at gentility that makes the rough old
grandfather unwelcome ; there are often moral
reasons too grave to be spoken of in detail. The
parents are trying to raise their children's whole
standard of life and thought and speech, and
the grandfather — deliberately with regard to what
he considers " stuflfn-nonsense," and unconsciously
with regard to more serious mattei^-hampers and
thwarts their endeavours. The parents could do
what they recognise as their "duty" by either
generation, but not within the limits of one small
house. The inferiority in moral refinement is, of
course, not invariably on the side of the parents;
experience of life, natural gifts, and fortunate as-
sociations, not seldom combine to make them the
superiors of their children ; but when this is the
case, sons and daughters of mature age rarely

38 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

fail to recognise it, and rejoice in it with a proud
humility.

Only a few days ago I heard of a widowed
mother — ^a husband's mother — ^who had entirely
revolutionised the slatternly household to which she
had retired on a tiny pension. Kitchen and child-
ren were soon almost unrecognisable, and the
change was effected not so much by her personal
work as by her personal influence. Even when she
wa^ fifty miles away, son and daughter had lied
freely in order to make her think that the babies
were cared for as she thought right, and at close
quarters she was an irresistible power. There was
nothing really bad about the daughter-in-law, but
the cottage was isolated, the husband good-natured
and indifferent, and the children not yet of school
age ; so that there was an unwholesome absence of
publicity, criticism, and appreciation.

The dangerous or unhealthy nature of certain
occupations, the recklessness with which compara-
tively safe ones are carried on, and the culpable
waste of life in childbirth, bring many marriages
to an early close. Poor men and women not only
marry again, but ought to do so; but a little
temporary help to prevent hasty and ever-to-be-
regretted unions might be an advisable form of
private charity, Widowers with children should
if possible marry widows in the same position.

FAMILY LIFE AMONG THE POOR 39

In cases where each has thus given hostages, com-
plaints of harsh or cruel treatment are relatively rare.
It is unlikely that the wife will feel such a passionate
and absorbing affection for the third family, when it
comes, that she will be blinded to all sense of duty
to the other two. Virtuous step-parents abound,
but they have no history. One woman, youngest
of ten by her mother's first marriage, did, however,
tell me : ** Step-father he never hit one of us no
more than he did his own. If ever mother went
for to give us a hiding, he'd always take our part."
That men shall spend a certain amount of money
in beer, tobacco, and halfpenny newspapers is
accepted by most wives as inevitable, but if the
same sums are laid out on harmless hobbies, or on
books, they are sadly grudged. Even if a husband
spends a little extra money in raising vegetables of
a superior quality to the " passel o' rubbish" grown
by his neighbours, the ordinary wife wiU say, in
tones of melancholy resignation, " Well, it's better
than the drink." In cases where the man's educa-
tion is much superior to the wife's, he conceals his
trifling expenditure on intellectual amusements as
sedulously as if they were crimes. I have read,
and sometimes heard, of men who lavish money on
dogs and poultry while wife and children are ragged
and half-starved, but I have never come across one.
Possibly they bear about the same proportion to

40 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

their class as the gambler or the morphiomaniac
does among the rich.

I have scarcely ever seen an indoor game of any
kind played in the homes of the poor. Cards,
draughts, chess, etc., are almost unknown. When
they appear, they will be at once the sign and the
cause of a great social and moral improvement.
At present there is wonderfully little voluntary
exertion of mind or body among ordinary wage-
earners. This inertia arises, no doubt, in many
cases from heavy physical fatigue, but to a great
extent it is merely a long-established habit of mind
and body which has changed far more slowly than
the conditions of labour. To work hard or to do
absolutely nothing is almost as general among men
who work eight hours a day as it was when they
worked twelve. The slowness of the change is
partly due to the cramped quarters in which they
live. If statistics could be collected of the number
of respectable and decently furnished homes pos-
sessing living-rooms where not even four persons
could sit down to an orderly meal or carry on
occupations of the least exacting type, the result
would be quite as distressing to all those with
properly cultivated imaginations as the statistics
relating to what is legally termed over-crowding.
Any philanthropic house-builder who really under-
stood the needs and habits of the poor would

FAMILY LIFE AMONG THE POOR 41

provide a wash-house in which it was literally
impossible to sit down, a very small front parlour,
to be sacrificed — not without much spiritual gain —
to gentility, and a roomy kitchen, in which comfort,
sociability, and industry were all possible.

The size of rooms is almost as important as
their number. Speaking solely with reference to
physical health, a family living in one large third-
floor room, with a sash window and with a fire
almost constantly burning, may be better housed
than one with a small ground-floor kitchen and two
minute bedrooms with no chimney and windows
that cannot be opened without letting in a violent
draught, possibly accompanied by driving rain or
snow.

If only the poor were discontented ! " Carlyle
said a contented mind is a continual feast," said a
man who had just been beating my carpets. I did
not dispute the authorship of the phrase, but I never
lose a chance of disputing the doctrine. " Then
why did you beat my carpets ? You were not in real
need of the money. Discontent is the cause of all
exertion. If your wife were contented, she would
not even boil the turnips for your dinner. They
can be eaten raw." " Ah," he replied solemnly,
" now that just shows there's two ways o' lookin'
at things. Carlyle didn't think of that."

The poor have been taught cleanliness for

42 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

centuries, and they know a great deal about it, and
often practise it against fearful odds : if they could
in addition learn a little punctuality and order,
the labour entailed by cleanliness, and its temper-
souring qualities, would be reduced to a minimum.
Meals are postponed indefinitely so that " cleaning "
can be finished ; and then, for want of door-scrapers
and door-mats, and for want also of domestic
discipline, the floor is not even dry before it is
again dirty. All my sympathies went with an old
sailor who said judicially, " I like the house clean —
mod'ritly — but we must pipe reg'lar to meals."

The least satisfactory feature with regard to the
family life of the poor is in the relations between
the old and the middle-aged. These faulty rela-
tions are painfully complicated, even when not
chiefly caused, by money matters, by the claims
unhesitatingly made on the one side and grudg-
ingly conceded or refused by the other.

Children owe their parents love, consideration,
tenderness, protection, and personal service; but
they do not owe them their daily bread, and in
ordinary cases they cannot give it to them with-
out either abjuring matrimony altogether, or by
depriving their own children of what it is desir-
able for them to have, or by indefinitely postponing
provision for their own old age — thus repeating the
same mistakes over and over again.

FAMILY LIFE AMONG THE POOR 43

Why is the world always tx> be in arrears ? I
recently came across a very steady man and his
wife, earning about twenty-seven shillings a week.
They belonged to a sick club and a burial club, but
apparently there was no thought of old age ; and
as they were childless, it seemed peculiarly im-
provident. I asked the wife for an explanation,
and she told me, in her strangely inverted phrase-
ology : " Their daughter does for them, but my
husband and his brother has to support their
mother 'n father between 'em." The injustice in
this case was a double one, for the father had been
a skilled artisan and had earned high wages until
over sixty years of age, but neither of the sons had
been given a trade, and the daughter had married
a labourer.

The number of children who remain single in
order to support a widowed mother or disabled
father is surprisingly large, and the results are
invariably bad. When the break-up of the home
comes at last, the son, as a middle-aged or even
elderly man, marries, and begins the task of bringing
up a family,—" rocking a cradle with spettaculs,"
as one indignant cottager expressed it, — ^while the
daughter dies worn out with fatigue, or ends her
days in the Union.

I remember one instance where a daughter
after working for her father and almost entirely

44 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

maintaining him for nearly twenty years, was
left broken in health and with the choice before
her of semi-starvation, the workhouse, or marriage
with a cranky widower considerably her senior in
age and greatly her inferior in education.

In whatever class of life the parents depend on
the children, is the result good ? Take the favourite
case, thought beautiful by the sentimentalist, the
support of a well-born and well-bred woman by
her son. Can any man honestly say that the
opinion of the parent whose every necessity he has
io supply is of the same value in his eyes, is the
same restraint and the same stimulus that it would
be if she were independent of everything but his
respect and affection? I recollect reading a
letter written by a man to his totally dependent
mother. He was considered a model of filial
piety, but any free woman would quickly have
called him to account for its arrogance, and then
burnt it.

There are undoubtedly workers unable to make
even a meagre provision for their old age, but to
jump from that fact — ^by no means among the
unchangeable facts^ of life — to the necessity of
providing pensions for everyone, is as rational as
taking over the entire care and responsibility of
all wage-earners' children because a decreasing
minority among them cannot at all times manage

FAMILY LIFE AMONG THE POOR 45

to provide the essentials of healthy life for a large
family.

Considerable numbers of my acquaintances among
the poorer classes of wage-eamers make no attempt
to save anything for themselves until their youngest
children are self-supporting — and those youngest
children are often unconscionably slow!

Everyone has his favourite source from which he
would like to dip out a provision for the aged, but
the difference between the cost of bringing up the
first three and the last three children would well
repay inquiry. If the money were spent on solid
advantages for them, it would be a different matter ;
but in the majority of cases it is simply wasted on
harmful indulgences.

Supposing the aged to be possessed of a small
income, and dropping for the moment all considera-
tion of its origin, where are they likely to be
happiest — ^in an institution, living alone, or with
their married children ?

Institution life can never be suited to old people
other than hopeless invalids, for there cannot be
the freedom that is necessary to their comfort, and
great hardship is caused by the inevitable inflexi-
bility of the rules.

Should old and feeble parents live with their
married children? My experience leads me to
reply unhesitatingly that this plan is almost

46 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

invariably a failure. Even with the best inten-
tions and a genuine substratum of affection, three
generations cannot live peaceably in one crowded
house ; and although the parents may be welcomed
by son or daughter, what about the son's wife or
daughter's husband ?

I knew an excellent woman who, in order to pay
her mother's rent and add to the tiny provision
left by her father, was wearing herself out as cook-
general to employers who ** were always very nice
and polite, and all that, and thought nothing of
money, but — ^well, they've been in India, and I
find people who have been in India are all alike.
Although it's such a big house, and no one but
me, they won't even feed the dog or fill the
flower vases."

I heard later on that the eldest son had offered
his mother a home, and remonstrated with the
daughter for not inducing her mother to accept.
" It's only a sham," she said bitterly. " He does it
so that I can't come on him for anything else for
mother. He knows well enough that I wouldn't
let her go there to be put on by his wife, and
worried and cheeked by his noisy, spoilt children —
no, not as long as I can stand on my two feet."

The aged poor are infinitely happier if they can
keep a home of their own, even a single room ; and
it is surprising to witness up to^ what a great age

FAMILY LIFE AMONG THE POOR 47

it is possible for them to do all their own house
work, and how much better they are for the
exertion. I have known many old people bed-
ridden from sheer dispiritedness, but this never
happens when they maintain their independence.
I have known many old widows and widowers
who^ with the moral support of a postcard
addressed to the district nurse and ready to be
despatched in case of need, have lived safely and
contentedly year after year on a pittance less than
half of what it would have cost to keep them
pining in a workhouse.

Those who maintain that there is no real and
true family life if aged parents cannot find a home
with their children, must remember that, owing to
early marriages and to the havoc played by death,
emigration, and migration, men and women of
sixty-five, sixty, or even less, are offcen as much
alqne in the world as if they had never been
married

With regard to the general position of the aged
poor, I can only say that if they possess a small
independence, even one plainly insufl&cient for their
entire support, they receive affection from their
children and much kindly and respectful assistance
from their neighbours. If totally dependent on
others, they have little love from their children,
much help and pity from their neighbours,

48 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

and very little respect from anyone. This truth
may sound brutal, but the possession of hardly
earned and hardly saved money is a strong proof
of superior intellect and character, and it is to
these that homage is rendered.

The cheerfulness and exultant contentment of
the aged poor who have managed to maintain
independence even on the most rigorous terms, and
the generous wideness of their outlook, are simply
admirable. I never can understand how the belief
arose that old people are soured, or wrapped up in
themselves and their ailments. Men and women
who might excusably talk by the hour of their
y physical sufferings scarcely care to answer my
inquiries as to their health, so eager are
they to tell me the contents of their newspaper.
" Their" newspaper, by the way, is fondly believed
to be different in substance as well as wording
from everyone else's. If means permitted them
to buy several, comparison would result in the
belief that they had been scandalously robbed.
They also seem to be quite unaware of the liberty
of the press, and are usually awestruck by the
daring of those who speak disrespectfully of
dignities.

There is a curious assumption that in all differ-
ences of opinion the view accepted by the lower
classes is unvaryingly wrong. For example, we

FAMILY LIFE AMONG THE POOR 49

are convinced that light, air, space, and cleanliness
are the chief ingredients of good health. The
working classes as a whole are equally certain
that among themselves the direst enemy of life,
and especially of child life, is cold air. Are they
altogether mistaken ? In the married quarters of
the most modern military barracks, I always found
that if a soldier's child caught a severe cold, the
only chance of saving its life was in sending round
an appeal to all the other Mrs. Atkinses and
borrowing their brown emergency blankets. Some
we spread on the floor, with others we formed a
tent open only towards the fire ; and then the child
sometimes did as well as in the ordinary stuffy,
over-furnished bedroom in workmen's quarters.
Doctors were well aware of this, for as they looked
round the large, bare, clean, airy room, their in-
variable request was, ** Do try if you can't raise the
temperature." When the advantages of air and
water are pointed out to my patients, the usual
reply is, " Ah, but you've been bred [or sometimes
" fed "] up to it. Cold kills us." There is profound
truth in this : cold is more deadly to them than
any germ yet discovered.

One of the weakest points of home life among

the very poor is that the parents seem to have

lost, or never to have acquired, the belief that, as far

as their abilities permit, they ought in all things to

4

50 ' FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

be their children's teachers. So far from learning
in order that they may teach, they do not dream
of teaching what they know. A few months ago I
asked a woman who bore an excellent reputation
for industry and had seven children, ranging from
twelve to nearly thirty years of age, and was a fairly
good housewife, if her youngest daughter, a girl of
seventeen, knew anything of cooking. She replied,
" Her mistress have taught her all kinds of house
work, but I shouldn't say she knew anything at all
of cooking," adding, rather resentfully, " She's never
been learned." I found that the girl could not boil
an egg, had never done such a thing, and had no
idea how to cook potatoes or any other vegetables,
nor did she know whether she had better allow one
hour, or two, or more, for the process. It very
commonly happens that mothers who can wash and
get up linen well allow their daughters to remain in
complete ignorance of the art, and the same thing
is true with regard to cutting out and plain dress-
making. Occasionally a mother will say, "I've
taught her everything I know," but this is a mark
of great superiority, instead of a mere commonplace
of maternal duty. I fear that there has been some
deterioration in the domestic training given to girls
in their own homes. In the same village a hand-
some woman, who cannot be more than sixty years
of age, showed me the largest house but one in the

FAMILY LIFE AMONG THE POOR 5 1

place, and said, " That is where I went out first as
a servant. I was eight years old." " What other
servants were there ? " " There weren't none but
me. I stopped two years." ** But what work
could you possibly do at that age ? " "I could
clean the doorstep and wash the floors, and chop
wood, and light fires, and rub knives, and clear up
after meals. Some washing, too, I could do, and
lots of things besides. Girls had to turn out earlier
then. I began at eight and I left off at eight-and-
twenty." " Did you never go to school ? " " Not
three weeks in my life — to a day school, that is.
I went to Sunday school, and learnt to read. When
I was fifteen I went right away to service in
London, and that soon learnt me to write ! I don't
mind using a pen now, not for anyone to see!"
Even the better-educated among the mothers
rarely seem to follow up the children's school work
or have any idea of co-operating with the teachers.
I knew one mother, however, who when her little
girl was learning to knit gloves, bought needles and
wool, and made the child repeat the day's lesson
every evening. I am sorry to add that the girl
turned out unsatisfactorily, mainly owing to a lack
of affection, self-excused by a grudging sense that
she had been more hardly disciplined than her neigh-
bours. Fathers still more rarely attempt to give
instruction. I have recently employed a boy of

52 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

sixteen, the son of a superior gardener, and he
knows no more of his father's trade, and is far less
interested in it, than if he were a London errand-
boy. Not long ago I had an older lad from a
family of carpenters ; he did not know how to use
a hammer, was perfectly helpless with a saw, and
seemed to have no knowledge of the " nature " of
wood, except that it was combustible.

Joint households are perhaps the most distin-
guishing feature of domestic life amorig the poor ;
there are few homes in which no trace of the system is
to be found. It is partly to insufficient recognition
of this truth that we owe many newspaper facts as
to wages received and rent paid in certain districts,
and the simply impossible margin left for food,
clothes, and firing. The joint household^sometimes
represents family life at its highest, and it often
gives a stability to the working-class home which
it could not otherwise possess, enabling periods of
sickness or unemployment to be safely tided over ;
but there are other sides to the question, and they
are sometimes darkly shaded.

My first introduction to the joint household was
in its least attractive form. On an open shelf in a
north-country back kitchen which served at once as
larder, tool-house, box-room, menagerie, and a
place for performing the rougher parts of the house
work, I saw, ranged at even distances, five plates,

FAMILY LIFE AMONG THE POOR 53

each with a loaf in cut, and each surrounded by a
small group of miscellaneous groceries wrapped in
paper. This meant five independent members
living under the same roof, paying a share of
the rent and a trifling acknowledgment of their
mothers services, but in no way receiving the
discipline, bearing the burden, or enjoying the
pleasures of real home life. The joint household is
only tolerable so long as it maintains an accepted
head, and each member pays the mother a sum to
cover all expenses, and shares in the common meals.
When there are three generations in the house, the
eldest often lives in this fashion ; but as the old
people usually have a separate room and a separate
fire, it has not the same unseemliness in their case,
and there is the reasonable excuse that the aged and
feeble need different food and at different hours from
those in their full strength. In addition, the uncon-
trolled expenditure of their little incomes affords
an intensely interesting occupation, deprived of
which old people are likely to sink into querulous-
ness or despondency, or to become bedridden from
sheer lack of all suitable stimulus.

One of the most common forms of the joint
household is where grown-up sons live with elderly
parents or a widowed mother. The great draw-
back to this is that the profits on "doing for
them " often form a large proportion of the income

54 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

of the older generation, and it becomes the direct
interest of the parents to prevent their sons from
marrying. All social intercourse with respectable
young women of suitable age and disposition is
more or less openly checked, and parents who
would be astounded if anything were said in
disparagement of their system of ethics or religion,
allow bachelor sons to live under their roof, giving
them every imaginable licence, and well knowing
how their freedom is used. This is even done
when there are young and impressionable daughters
in the house, from whom no attempt is made to
conceal the truth. Exceptions are, of course, to
be found. I remember one woman who had been
genuinely ignorant of the life her son was leading,
and, when the facts were suddenly revealed to
her, she never rested until she had compelled him
to marry a girl he was known to have ruined.

A still larger number of joint households are
composed of girls between sixteen and twenty-six
working in shops and factories and living with
their parents and younger sisters and brothers.
The weak point here is that in a large majority
of cases the girls are not really earning their full
livelihood, and are partly a burden at an age
when they ought to be economically independent.
Their average earnings frequently do not amount
to more than six shillings a week, of which four,

FAMILY LIFE AMONG THE POOR 55

or even less, are given to the mother to provide
literally everything except clothes and pocket-
money — and occasional demands may be made
for these also. Some of the results of this state
of affairs were pointed out to me by a shrewd
young woman of about thirty, wife of a London
printer. "What they pay mostly goes towards
the rent. Mothers with two or three girls at home
can pay quite a fancy sum, and it runs everyone's
rent up in a way you'd never believe unless you'd
seen it, as I have. Most of the money they get
from them goes for that, and what's left out of
3s. 6d. or 4s. don't hardly begin to feed hungry,
sprawling, great girls like that. It just means
that they're eating the food away from the little
ones, let alone crowding 'em up, and often hunting
'em about and seeming to kind of hate them into
the bargain. Sometimes the fathers is sharp
enough to see through it, and then there's a row
and a clear out, and of course that ends in some-
thing worse. No one don't want to see young
girls drove to live by theirselves like savidges, but
if they aren't earning enough to pay properly in-
stead of dragging on their fathers, they'd ought
to go to service. But that's just what their
mothers don't like. They enjoy to feel the money
in their hinds, however quick they have to part
with it. They'll tell you they like to keep their

S6 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

girls with 'em, they like 'em to feel they have a
home ; but it's just greed and foolishness. It's
the little ones I pity most — the best food took
from them, and everything they has grudged.
And then the girls aren't kept in no kind of order
at all. They won't do a stroke of house work —
they won't even make their own beds — and they
often behave in a way the younger ones would
be smacked for — and serve 'em right, too. I know
one woman who gets up every morning and heats
a bucket of water so there's no excuse for her
girl not having a good wash, and she goes off to
the factory without so much as dipping the end
of her nose or the tips of her fingers. Catch me
eating no choc'late with that label ! And there's
girls who might live decent, with mothers willing
to wash and mend for them, and they'll just clap
on their clothes and wear 'em till they can't be
mended, and their mothers is ashamed to hang 'em
on the line. Often they won't take 'em off till
they're fit for nothing but to be put straight into
the fire. The mothers brought it on theirselves
at the beginning, and they put up with it to save
the girls from being drove to worse. There's
always a worse. That's what holds them from
sayin' much to their sons, neither. Nothing's as
simple as you'd think, miss ; not when you comes
to look into it."

FAMILY LIFE AMONG THE POOR 57

Perhaps the most entirely undesirable form of
the joint household is where a lodger is admitted
who is in no way related to the family. Accus-
tomed to see lodgers and lodgings of a different
type, it is difficult for the richer classes to fully
realise the undesirability of what seems an easy
and profitable form of domestic industry. In
their experience, the lodger is commonly the
superior of the landlord in means, education, and
social position. Among the poor, broadly speak-
ing, the lodger is the inferior of the householder
in many important respects. He is usually with-
out capital, often without character, and not
seldom dangerously deficient in intellect; and
tenants who have taken a larger house than they
can afford, trusting to his regular payments, find
him a broken reed, while there are methods of
wronging the landlord sometimes deadlier and
often more exasperating. A childless married
woman whom I have known for many years took
a lad of nineteen as a lodger. The terms of the
" let " were somewhat complicated : he paid 4s.
a week, and she was to do his cooking, washing,
and mending, and supply him with hot tea twice
a day, and he was to sit by the kitchen fire when
he chose, the unexpressed condition being that he
would exercise a mannerly discretion in such a
delicate matter. The rent, rates, and taxes of the

58 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

house only amounted to 5s. a week, so that there
seemed room for profit — ultimately, that is to
say, for his arrival had entailed an expenditure
of 18s. on two substantial pieces of second-hand
furniture. A few months later my old friend
referred to her lodger as the worst bargain she
had ever made. " Is he backward with his rent ? "
I asked. "No, miss; it isn't that. He's about
as lazy as they make 'em, but he earns his ten
or 'leven shillings a week pretty reg'lar, and I don't
forget to ask him for it of a Saturday, and there
isn't no boldness about him." "Is he noisy or
quarrelsome?" "No, miss; he's good-natured
enough, and he don't drink nothing worth naming,
nor yet smoke, and he's pretty careful with the
furniture— for a lodger, that is." " Is he getting
into bad company ? " I asked, at a loss to imagine
what objection there could be to such a tame and
colourless youth. " Well, miss, it's this way. It
was agreed that he was to set in the kitchen when
he chose, but of course we never thought as he
wouldn't have the manners to keep away when
we was at meals. But no ; sure as ever we've got
a bit of anything nice and hot, there he'll stick,
and he'll sniff and he'll sniff, and stare, and pass
remarks, and sigh, till one or the other of us — ^and
I must own it's oftenest me — will say, *Like a
bit?' and then, without no more asking than

FAMILY LIFE AMONG THE POOR 59

you'd give a dog, he pegs into it until what 1
meant for next day's dinner looks pretty foolish.
You understand me, miss : if he was really in need,
neither of us wouldn't grudge it to him, seeing
that he keeps hisself respectable, and he's got no
parents and no home ; but he's got no call to live
three days on half a sheep's head if he don't
want to. There's nothing as I knows on to stop
his earning two or three shUlings more pretty
nearly every week, and yet you carCt sit there and
eat a hot meal with him looking on."

The lodger ought certainly to be confined to the
homes of the middle-aged and the elderly, as he
is never a desirable companion or example for
childhood. In the Blocks his presence is strictly
forbidden, and he can only be harboured under
the dread penalty of a week's notice to quit ; but
with obliging neighbours and a folding bedstead
there is not much to betray his existence to the
Inspector, and perhaps it is some lingering capacity
for comfortably established domestic life, and not
sheer perversity, which makes him so peculiarly
anxious to enter these exclusive circles.

The lodger is almost always a man. Owing to
the low rate of women's wages, they are rarely
able to pay even tke moderate rates demanded by
the workman's wife. When possessed of suflScient
money, however, they are regarded — and often

6o FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

with justice— as an unmixed blessing to the land-
lady fortunate enough to secure them : early in
their hours, punctual in their payments, ** improv-
ing " for the children, and often actively helpful to
the overwrought house-mother. If the day ever
dawns when wages of 25s. and 30s. a week are as
common among women- workers as lOs. and 12s. are
now, "paying guests" will be plentiful, and the diffi-
cult problem of earning money in late middle-ageand
in broken health will be solved. There is a curious
prejudice among the rich that their expenditure
mysteriously supports the working classes, while
the expenditure of persons drawing good wages
benefits no one but themselves — and that most
doubtfully.

Another description of joint households increas-
ingly common in all districts where the demand
for labour fluctuates or is rapidly expanding is
that formed by two married couples entirely
unrelated to one another. The householders are
usually the seniors, and generally possess all the
furniture ; but where the arrangement is of a more
permanent nature, the lodgers bring their own
belongings and cook by their own fire. In cases
where both the men are equally steady, and
the children few in number or very young, the
plan answers well, and the wives are extremely
serviceable to one another. But after a few months

FAMILY LIFE AMONG THE POOR 61

it often happens that the lodger's work and wages
come to an end, and then a burden is thrown upon
the householders in proportion to the strength of
the friendship between the women. It may be
several weeks before the lodger decides to move to
some other town, and all that time he and his wife
are housed and half fed for nothing, while there
is small intention of ever paying the arrears, and
still smaller expectation of receiving them.

Notwithstanding these experiences, much con-
fidence is shown in immigrants. I have even
known the householders go away for ten days'
holiday, leaving them in entire charge of all their
possessions, and on their return I have heard fewer
and more trivial charges brought against them
than have often been poured out with reference
to judges, generals, and even archdeacons, when
left in somewhat similar circumstances.

Ill

Some Mental and Moral Characteristics

OF THE Poor

Broadly speaking, the people who become and
remain rich are those who accept all the responsi-
bilities that life brings them, and even seek for
more; those who continue, or who become, poor,
are those who shirk these responsibilities, those
who, almost unknown, to themselves, are seeking
to shake off some burden which it is for the
" safety, honour, and welfare " of their manhood
that they should bear; while the philanthropist
tries to trim the boat by reproaching the rich,
more for their virtues than their sins, and heaping
up ingenious temptations for the poor, unable to
see that his well-meant endeavours are still further
jeopardising the balance. Show me a poor man
who accepts all the duties of family life and has
interests closely connected with them but reaching
out boldly beyond them, and I will show you one
who in a very short time will have ceased to be

CHARACTERISTICS OF THE POOR 63

poor in any distressful or hampering sense of the
word, whose children will be well off, and whose
grandchildren will be rich. The converse is equally
true : let a man, whether unconsciously or of
malice aforethought, strive to reduce the claims
made on him, cut off all unselfish interests, refuse
to meet all social obligations, and the downfall of
his family will be rapid and complete.

]^any of the mental differences which distinguish
the poor from the rich spring from this ethical

root. The nnw^]]ingTiP.Qfl ffO i|)t,f>pfArA^ fn "put

oneself forward," are often much stronger than^
moral sense, or even feelings of humanity and
compassion. From a generally worthy and trust-
worthy woman, a laborious housewife and tender
mother, I received such deplorable accounts of a
neighbour's treatment of her children that, after
checking them by my own observation, I felt obliged
to make an appeal to the National Society for the
Prevention of Cruelty. Instantly my informant's
prejudices were aroused, and proved far stronger
than her undoubtedly strong feelings of pity for
four cruelly neglected boys, the eldest not six
years old. Ignoring all her repeated and detailed
accusations, she averred sullenly, *'0f course I
don't know nothin' about it. If I'm asked, I can't
say nothin'," and to this she adhered. Unfortun-
ately, the case could speak for itself. An intolerably

64 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

nauseous smell reached my nostrils a few days
later, and on inquiry as to the cause I was
told by a younger and less cautious neighbour,
"The N-Spectre has a-been, and he said the
children's bedding was to be burnt, and the rags
that she calls their clothes."

Class feeling, no doubt, accounted to some
extent for the first woman's sudden change of
attitude, but the strongest element was a shrink-
ing from responsibility. It would be a mistake to
imagine that class feeling and class consciousness
are generally accompanied by active dislike ; they
are chiefly important because they so heavily
discount the value of all benevolent effort working
from above. It has often surprised me to observe
the tolerance, and even sympathy, with which the
public amusements and extravagant personal ex-
penditure of the wealthy are regarded by those in
he narrowest poverty. Perhaps self-knowledge,
and a consequent lack of excessive self-reverence,
may be at the bottom of this charitable disposition.
A socialistically inclined friend of mine had been
staying in the house of a "self-made '^ north-country
man, and told me : "He has nineteen horses in his
stables, and streets fuU of men who work for him
at nineteen shillings a week What seems to me
the worst part is that these men admire him, and
would imitate him if they could."

CHARACTERISTICS OF THE POOR 65

People who wish to know the effect of their
kindly meant visits among the poor would be
mortified to know how often the result is pure
amusement. They so honestly wished to give
instruction, and they have supplied highly
appreciated farce. It is always difficult to under-
stand how easy it is to amuse one's fellow-men —
unintentionally. All workers among the poor
must remember that the best results come, not by\
assimilating themselves to those who are to be \
influenced, but by the force of contrast. In a
very poor neighbourhood I constantly followed in
the traces of a sisterhood trained on what were
considered practical and liberal lines, but I found
that even' — or one might say especially — in the
most unpolished households they had aroused a
certain amount of antagonism, not by their
religious teaching, not by their love of fresh air,
but by the loudness of their voices and the high
percentage of slang and unlovely colloquialisms
to be found in their speech. They were women of
such an age and such a position in life that this
method and manner must have been deliberately
acquired. I wish I could have brought home to
them a piece of information given to me by an
old sailor some thirty years ago : " A loud voice
is no good in a storm. The youngest, shrillest-
voiced midshipman stands by the captain and
S

66 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

repeats his orders. His thin little pipe carries
farther than the boatswain's deepest roar." I
have been shown men who have been raised from
the lowest degradation by the efforts of the
Salvation Army, but the ordinary working-man
laughs more or less good-naturedly at their " goings
on," and the ordinary woman shrinks from them
with aversion, every sensibility outraged by their
blatancy. And in duly varying degrees this is
true of all "popular" preaching. The most
likely remarks with regard to a clergyman who
is really influencing the lives of his poorer
parishioners would be, " He has such a quiet way
of speaking," and "You'll always find him the
same."

I remember the horror with which an intelligent
young woman told me, on returning from church,

" Mr. said that somethin'er-other — I didn't

catch what — ^was no more use than beefsteak to a
hahy. There's a way of talking ! I should think
his wife might learn him better."

She honestly preferred a locum-tenens who
discoursed lengthily on "the trinal triplicity of
the heavenly hierarchy," and " adamantine chains
and penal fire." The latter is always an attractive
subject. I once heard a country rector hold forth
on it. His sermons were usually of a strictly
practical and moral nature, but were coldly

CHARACTERISTICS OF THE POOR 67

tolerated on account of their brisk delivery and
extreme brevity. On this occasion, however, the
worst member of the least satisfactory family in
the village told me spontaneously, "Ah, I could
have listened to Rector for an hour. I did think
it lovely."

It has been suggested that the diflference between
the angelic and the human mental powers may be
that to these spiritual beings all past experience
presents itself simultaneously to their minds when-
ever they wish to recall it ; while to mortals it
appears successively, and often in very slow
succession, thus necessarily giving rise to ill-
balanced judgments. However this may be, there
can be no doubt that the simultaneity of the
recollection of all the essential points of a question
varies with the general intellectual development,
and the contradictoriness and apparently wilful
falsity of the evidence given from day to day by
uneducated witnesses depends upon the relative
;S£ea^nfisa..ofJbhejp t h i Ti g a . . a iS a w hole.

One day the general consensus of opinion in an
entire village, or in a couple of streets in a
working-class quarter, will be that Mrs. Purkiss is
an excellent wife, and if the faintest chip or flaw
can be found in her character, it is entirely due
to her husband ; and a large amount of evidence,
all substantially true, is brought forward to prove

68 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

the case. Mr. Purkiss's character in no way
changes, but he breaks his neck, has a bad attack
of pneumonia, or develops consumption. Instantly
opinion veers round : every scrap of evidence in
favour of Purkiss and against his wife rushes
hurriedly to the neighbours' minds and tongues,
and Mrs. Purkiss's virtues sink out of sight with
equal completeness and rapidity. Probably it is
the same cast of thought which in earlier days
denied the unity of nature and produced innumer-
able gods and devils. Outside a police-court there
is not much reason to doubt the evidence of
uneducated witnesses — one only needs to doubt its
completeness, and beware of their conclusions.

It is always dangerously easy to take a too
pathetic view of matters. A lady accompanying
me on my rounds was struck by a forlorn little
figure tenderly nursing one of her father's Sunday
boots, wrapped in a dirty pinafore which had been
intended to hide the holes in her frock. I knew
that she was the child and grandchild of skilled
artisans, and I had seen her so often standing erect
in her Saturday tub that I knew the dirt was
superficial and that no signs of want or ill-treat-
ment were observable ; but the pathos of the scene
was too deep to be combated by mere common-
sense, and my friend went home and dressed a doll
for her. The child received it doubtfully, but with

CHARACTERISTICS OF THE POOR 69

a slight preponderance of pleasure. That day she
broke it, the next she utterly destroyed it, and was
soundly slapped by her slatternly mother. Half
an hour later I saw her, the tear-stains scarcely
dry, smiling grimily but sweetly as she hushed
her father's boot to sleep once more.

It is peculiarly easy to exaggerate the sufferings
of children, because we only see the injury inflicted,
and cannot estimate the sensitiveness which
regulates the amount of pain consequent upon the
action we reprobate. I knew an instance where an
only and idolised child endured between the age of
three and five the caprices and violence of a nurse
who ought not to have been in charge of her for
five minutes. Sometimes the woman's anger and
recklessness were so great that severe bruises were
visible, and she would account for them by saying
that the child had fallen down. Occasionally the
father uttered a puzzled protest : " But when does
she fall down ? She always seems to me so sure-
footed." But no serious doubts were felt until one
evening when the nurse had a holiday. The mother
took her place, and discovered bruises that no con-
ceivable series of accidents could have caused. The
little girl was never permitted to set eyes on the
nurse again, but when tenderly reproached for her
want of confidence in her parents, she could give
no explanation of her conduct. She was a lively,

70 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

intelligent, and to some extent a sensitive child ;
but she was no Harriet Martineau or Charlotte
Bronte. Years afterwards she told me : " My
parents blamed themselves far too much over the
matter. I did not even dislike the woman. She
used to fly into a rage and beat me, and then she
would be sorry for it and give me sweets. I
simply never thought of complaining. Perhaps if
she had ever asked me not to tell, it might have
put the idea into my head ; but she seemed to take
my silence as much for granted as I did." There
are plenty of people who would have attributed
every weakness or misfortune of their after-life
to even a twentieth part of the ill-treatment that
this more happily constituted nature had endured
without so much as a shadow of retrospective re-
sentment.

In considering the condition of the poor, we must
not read tragedy where the actors read comedy, or
shed tears over what they consider an amusing
farce. Take this, for example : on a hot spring
day, an old man, very stiff and slow in his move-
ments, was ordered by his employer to wheel a sack
of seed potatoes to a house a mile to the north, and
a sack of cooking potatoes to one a mile to the
south. He exactly reversed the process. When
he suddenly discovered the mistake, and that this
fatiguing piece of work must be done over again,

CHARACTERISTICS OF THE POOR 71

he roared with laughter, and looking round for
someone to share the joke, saw a poor old woman
standing on her doorstep, and crossed the road to
explain the matter to her, and she joined very
heartily in his mirth. I recollect a story told me
by an old gentleman educated in a rough public
school. It was in the year 1832, for the recital
was somehow connected with the burning of the
Houses of Parliament. One of the youngest of his
schoolfellows went to the form master and asked,
** Please, sir, will you give me a sheet of paper to
write a letter home ? " " Why ? " " Please, sir, it's
so long since I heard from anyone, that I'm afraid
they're all dead." " If they're dead, they don''t
want any letters. Go away, boy." This passed
throughout the school for an excellent jest, and
even the sixty years that elapsed before it was
related to me had not been long enough to develop
a sense of its pathos in this one, at any rate, of its
hearers.

That the poor are "all alike," with the im-
plication that we are entirely different and better,
is a conamon fallacy. But, after all, why should
one be surprised at the general failure ^to dis-
tinguish, to recognise the broad human likenesses,
and yet neither exaggerate nor overlook the " odds
that make the difference " ? The poor think in the
same way of the rich, and the rich in their eyes

tf f ^11 1 ■» w i l l I I til n il \ tm m mm u » i^ •.-~. I, i^«i III -^

72 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

are all but the weekly wftge-^ingigrs, "I ain't got
nothin' to say against Mrs. P.," said a villager;
" so soon's anybody's ill, she do send them some-
thing." "And who sends Mrs. P. anything when
she is ill ? " " Oh," — in tones more horror-stricken
than if I had uttered what was notoriously a libel,
— " she don't want nothing. She's got plenty of
money." The lady in question kept no servant,,
and spent far less than the cheapest servant's wages
on dress ; on personal pleasures she spent nothing,
and she had to work extremely hard to supplement
her impossibly narrow income.

The poor^are^^jeinaj^^ ; we

may add the colloquial "only more so," but not
unless we are including good points as well as
bad. We are apt to think that wage-earners are
specially differentiated by their improvidence ; but
those^diosa naturaL^flJis poYerty hftrd,by dea^^^^

tion are to be foundin-^lldassea^aiidif the^weUzto-
do ju:fi,.^Jower ip jreac^ it is

merely because they have farther to travel. I knew
an instance where a man earning a fixeiS income of
two thousand a year died suddenly in the late
autumn. He left three young daughters, who had
never in their lives brushed their own hair or
buttoned their own boots, and not enough money
to pay the bills due at Christmas. Another, for
manv years in receipt of upwards of five hundred^

CHARACTERISTICS OF THE POOR 73

died, leaving boys in an equaUy bad position.
One of them, a lad of seventeen, in no way
mentally deficient, could barely read. In a third
case a middle-aged man in receipt of four hundred
died after a brief illness, and the day following
the funeral a subscription had to be started to
meet the pressing wants of his widow and only
child. In yet another case a man, after capitalising
and squandering his own pension, s61d his widow's.
Cionsidering that the sale was illegal^ ^nd that the
purchaser could not be certain that the seller would
leave a widow, and stiU less certain how long she
would remain one, it can be imagined how trivial
the temptation was, the mere bottle of whisky for
which he sold it. The dying words of another
well-paid official, addressed to his penniless
daughters and professionless sons, were, " Kemember
that you have the Benevolent Society to depend
on." At some period of his life he had been
induced to bestow a small donation on this cor-
poration, and he expected a return, which shows
that j^ejma^ations of improvidexice we . far
beyond the provi^rbial dreams of avarice.

Decegtion. appears to be no sin at all, and any
pumsCment dealt out for it is regarded as harsh
and capricious. For example, in many country
districts it is an unwritten law that during the
spring an agricultural labourer may ask for a day's

74 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

paid leave "to plant his garden," although in
others Good Friday afternoon, regardless of date
or of weather, is considered to be the right and
peculiarly blessed time to devote to this purpose.
On one occasion, when a man claimed this privilege
it happened to be extremely inconvenient to his
master, but it was granted without delay or demur
on account of his large family. Soon after the
master had the annoyance of discovering that not
a single spadeful of earth had been turned in the
man's garden, and that he had spent the day
working for another farmer. He dismissed him,
and although employment was only too easy to
obtain in the neighbourhood, he was considered
by the villagers to have shown extreme severity.
The modern idea of morality as between
employer and employed is so one-sided that one
is tempted to accept Nietzschean theories as to
its origin and value. The Anglo-Indian constantly
complains that no " dastur " is ever in his favour,
but exactly the same thing goes on in England.
/ An employer must always and in all circumstances
/ keep his word, but the employ^ considers himself
I in no way bound to do the same. The fact that
there are two ends to every ladder never seems
J to enter people's heads *un til they are in a position
I of Bome responsibility.
\ §^^e^ is strongly developed among the poor,

CHARACTERISTICS OF THE POOR 75

and although often stained by deceitfulness and
even fraud, is closely connected with self-respect
and independence. Wages and the expenditure
of money are always shrouded in thick darkness,
but all details connected with food are trebly
secured from observant eyes, however kindly.
As a child I remember the long rows of men in
the royal dockyards seated each on his tool-chest
in the building-slips, furtively eating his dinner.
A benevolent admiral superintendent was struck
by the extreme discomfort of the plan, and had
tables and benches constructed and fixed by the
hundred yards. In the course of three years
I never saw them used. "Is it likely?" asked
a foreman, with pity for his ignorant good-will.
** Will the man with bread and cheese, and none
too much of that, spread it out by the side of
a man whose wife has sent him a nice hot
dinner? Why, there are heaps of men whose
wives bake a batch of pies on Sunday, and they
eat one a day aU through the week. Sometimes
the pie has a division down the middle, and there
is fruit on one side and meat on the other."
School children are constantly forbidden to tell
one another what they have had to eat — ^unless
occasionally, when there may be something to
boast of. If it were possible, these matters would
be as sedulously concealed from the district nurse

76 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

as from anyone else ; but her visits are so frequent
that they are certain to coincide sometimes with
a family meal. One detail is specially stamped
on my memory : if the family resources permitted
the purchase of a pound of butter, the whole pound
was always placed on the table, however hot the
kitchen might be, or however long the meal might
be kept about. Naturally, it did not take long
to reduce fairly good butter to the condition of
rancid oil. It was part of my duty to ascertain
whether the families I visited were in receipt of
parish reUef Whenever I noticed an abnormal
wastefulness with regard to bread, I spared myself
the annoyance of asking what was always an
irritating question.

" Doling out alms " is an action spoken of with
common contempt, but if given at all they should
certainly be " doled." The mere fact of requiring
alms affords a strong presumption either that the
recipient has never been accustomed to deal with
any but minute sums, or that he has entirely failed
in the management of larger ones. An old man in
the workhouse told me, with reference to a comrade
with whom he was on very friendly terms, "He
has a daughter who is most uncommonly kind to
him — in a way. Las' Chris'mas she goes and sends
him a sovereign and a half. In three days it were
all gone, and as he was never even drunk, you can

CHARACTERISTICS OF THE POOR ^^

guess how much he had out of it. If she'd a-took
the trouble to give it to him a shillin' at a time,
it 'ud ha' lasted him pretty well all the year, and
he'd ha' got some good out of the money. Most
of it went standin' treat to persons he'd never seen
in his life before."

le naivete of the poor is often extremely
amusing. " Fancy anyone going for to steal ! "
said an exceedingly lazy girl. " Why, if I wanted
anything, I'd much rather ask for it than what
I'd steal it." I can easily accept a "yarn" told
me many years ago by an old sailor. A small
and hungry drummer boy was left alone, while a
sudden change of weather delayed his messmates'
arrival, confronting the dinner prepared for the
whole party. The rule is, " Help those on watch
first," but as everyone but himself was on watch,
this scarcely seemed applicable to the case in hand.
Half an hour passed away, and the men arrived
ravenous. There was a sudden pause, and a
general shout of indignation : " Who's ate all the
lean?" "I did, messmates." "And who the
devil d'you suppose is going to eat all the fat?"
" I will, messmates."

Few questions are more difficult to solve when
one is brought much into contact with wage-earners
than those with reference to the lending of money.
One lady told me, " My father, throughout his life,

78 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

which was a very long one, frequently lent money
to poor parishioners, and he was invariably repaid ;
but this is entirely contrary to my own experience.
Anything that I lend is gone for ever. Last winter,
for example, when work was very slack, I lent a
house-painter £7 to prevent his home from being
broken up. liver since the early spring he has
had steady employment ; it is now September,
and he has not repaid one farthing. I went
to his wife a month ago and said, * If you
cannot pay me in the summer, when can you ever
hope to do it?' But there has been no result."
The fact is, human nature cannot be trusted in
any class of life to repay a loan to private persons,
and although circumstances might sometimes arise
when a few pounds might be the salvation of a
family, if they could be borrowed at a reasonable
rate on a purely business footing, nevertheless any
widespread facilities for borrowing money would
cause infinitely more mischief than they cured.
Tfefi_duts_and inward «pjHgW^ ^^ Hj]£:,

the poQX,. They bow to necessity, but few of
them even profess to like work, and most of
the exceptions are to be found among the young
and the elderly. Of pleasure, the best part is
always picked out for description and comment ;
while with regard to work, only the worst moments

CHARACTERISTICS OF THE POOR 79

of the worst days are thought worthy of mention.
Any person who reverses this process is looked
on with disfavour as either crabbed, cynical, or
aflFecting a pose. I myself felt some qualms of
doubt as to the wholesomeness of mind of a
schoolgirl of fourteen who described a picnic in
these terms : " We had a long walk in the sun on
the high road. Then it rained heavily, and after
that we went in the forest. I saw a toad, and I
caught a cold."

It is a common fallacy with regard to the poor
\ that their brain comes very early to maturity and
generally ceases to develop about the age of sixteen.
If I accepted this belief, I should be driven to
the conclusion that the lower classes are hopelessly
degenerating, and with extraordinary rapidity ; for
everywhere I find that the middle-aged are more
intellectual than the young, and have more decided
and more practical views of ethical and religious
subjects, and the old are frequently more liberal-
minded and generally advanced than the middle-
aged.

From the age of thirty I should be inclined to
think that the men develop more morally and the
women intellectually.
I Possibly the leisure of old age has much to do

with the greater intelligence often displayed at
this period. Totally illiterate men have some-

8o FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

times amazed me with the keenness of their
comments on such matters as locid politics,
workhouse management, and the dispensing of
public and private charity, and also with their
extreme fluency of speech and freedom from the
senile trick of repetition.

Probably the most generally accurate test of
mental culture among the poor is their oonver-
sational power, with special reference to extent
of vocabulary, and ignoring all irregularities
of grammar and all peculiarities or errors of
pronunciation.

The number of words in common use among the
lower classes is greatly underestimated. Learned
men, in making their calculations, do not seem to
grasp that the wily villager is deliberately choosing
such words as he is sure his interlocutor will
understand, and rejecting all those he thinks he
will not, in addition to aU those that he has in
frequent use, but fears a stranger may consider
too fine for a person in his position, and all those
which he fancies he may expose himself to ridicule
by mispronouncing. These tendencies always have
to be allowed for. A woman missionary, who had
taken a considerable part in reducing an African
language to writing, told me : " We had to stalk
words as if they were the shyest of game. Out of
sheer politeness, the natives — especially the women

CHARACTERISTICS OF THE POOR 8i

— would keep on using the three or four hundred
words that we already knew, just as one would
instinctively do in speaking to a very young child.
I found the best way was to get them to tell me
some of the fables and fairy-tales that they recite
with so much verve and humour, and in the ex-
citement of the moment they would forget my
ignorance, and bring out words and phrases entirely
new to me."

As an instance of the care taken only to use
words with which they believe their interlocutor
to be acquainted, an old countryman, doubtful if
I knew the meaning of foal^ substituted the
increase of the horse.

If one wishes to know the ordinary language of
any poor person, one must be exceedingly careful
never to make any remark on the subject or to
ask any questions. In a village bakehouse I
chanced to hear a woman say, "Where's the
peel ? " and pick up the long wooden shovel with
which the loaves are drawn out. I said, " I have
not heard that word since I was seven years old.
I remember it then in a fairy-tale." She was
deeply offended, and for several years after she
never spoke freely in my presence.

Another source of error in such calculations is

this : the inquirer observes persons of twenty or

thirty who have had the advantage of a Board-
6

82 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

school education, finds their vocabulary narrowly
limited, and rashly concludes that older people
of the same class would employ speech of a still
less varied and precisely adapted nature. This is
an entire mistake : the elders have had time to
read more, especially newspapers, have had more
experience of life and work, and can generally
find abundance of words in which to clothe their
observations and theories. *^Bad boots was the
instigation of my illness," an old villager told me
one day last winter. Also it must not be for-
gotten that, Uke chUdren and foreigners, the poor
understand and appreciate a much wider range of
language than they use. A rich and picturesque
vocabulary is a real pleasure to them. Plain
Words for Plain Men and Women seems to aflford
no mental satisfaction whatever, and to be too
arid a spiritual food. " Not to have no language,"
is about the most damning criticism that can be
uttered of any preacher or teacher. Shrewd,
active-minded, unlettered persons, wishing to
explain matters exactly without entering into
what they consider coarse detail, often seem to
suffer from the same kind of irritation over a gap
in their vocabulary as is sometimes found in
inteUigent children confronted with some new
experience, and for polite use they greatly delight
in the capture of general utility phrases, such as

CHARACTERISTICS OF THE POOR 83

" The happy medium." I have often been amused
to hear third-generation cockneys make fairly
accurate use of nautical idioms picked up from
myself, such as : " Give it a wide berth," " Sailing
too close to the wind," " Not much time to veer
and haul upon," and so on.

The finest word I have heard in use lately came
from a country groom. A lad was helping him
harness a horse, and asked which of two straps he
was to buckle first. ** Oh, it's quite immaterial,"
replied the groom. " He talks like a book " may
often be truly said of the poor. They do; and
very stiff* and pompous books into the bargain. I
have many cottage neighbours who make such
remarks as : "I see your new fence is under course
of construction," " My son's present habitation is
in a most saloobrious sitooation," "Our monarch
would appear to be upon amicable terms with the
majority of the foreign royalties."

Often the use of this fine language is confused
and confusing. " I have to maintain my brother
now, as well as my father," said a vigorous,
happy-looking woman of about forty. "Is your
brother an invalid?" "Oh no, mum. We all
has our health. Even father can do a day's work
nows and thens, and he always will when he can.
He ain't like some." "Then why does not your
brother work ? " I asked, much scandalised " He

i

84 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

do, mum. Never been out of work in his life."
"Maintain" was simply the elegant English for
" keep house."

Many words used locally seem to be imitative.
A peasant farmer's wife was taking a favourite dog
a few miles by train one winter's night. She had
a ticket for the animal, but did not wish him to
go into the guard's van. "I see the station-
master a-comin', and I didn't want no splutt with
him, so I just cootched the dog up under my
shawl, and he was glad of it, for he was fair
nithered with the cold."

As one would expect, there is great ignorance of
all technical language, and as doctors can seldom
free themselves from its use, patients in the poorer
districts learn very little from them. "He said
father's leg was chronic," a villager told me
hesitatingly and with evident anxiety, "but I
don't know what it mean, and I didn't like for
to ask." "The doctor says her temperature is
much lower," said another woman, with a burst of
tears. Her little daughter was suffering from a
complaint of which one of the worst symptoms is
a high temperature.

Most of the warnings and regulations drawn up
by public authorities and afl&xed on notice-boards
are totally unintelligible to the persons for whom
they are intended; in addition, they are nearly

CHARACTERISTICS OF THE POOR 85

always out of reach of men and women of average
height, while the lines are so long that they add
incalculably to the difficulties of unpractised
readers.

Many years ago, an Oxford tutor gave me this
rule of literary composition : ** When you have
written a paragraph, read it over and ask yourself,
What would the stupidest person of my acquaintance
understand by this? Do not be satisj&ed unless
you are sure that your meaning would be clear to
him." On a freehand drawing-copy, of such an
elementary nature that it can only have been
intended for children or young workmen, I read
this printed direction : " Special care must be
taken to preserve the continuity of the tangential
spirals." The sole meaning of this legend was
that part of a vine tendril was hidden by a leaf,
and that the pupil must make it reappear at the
right spot.

Differences of pronunciation usually pass un-
marked, but a favourite expression among the poor,
which I think has come into use quite recently, is,
"Ah, that made him put in his aitches," used in
the sense of " That brought him to his bearings."
A very little girl, the daughter of an old friend,
was spending some weeks with me. The child had
lived much abroad, and had many peculiarities of
accent, but her persistent neglect of the letter " h "

86 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

was the most marked, and we began to fear that
she did not reproduce the sound because she was
incapable of hearing it. Our young cockney
housemaid heard us speak of the matter, and one
night told me complaisantly, "Miss Katie has
said an 'h/" "Has she? What did she say?"
" She ast me not to put the gas hout."

One sign of the growing familiarity with printed
language is the almost complete disuse of a
mnemonic formerly very common among the poor.
On hearing a new name they would say, "TU
think of so and so " (generally something utterly
incongruous), " and then I'll be able to call it to
mind." For instance, an old servant heard that
the daughter of a former employer had called her
little girl Mona, and remarked, " Til never be able
to remember it. Oh yes " (more hopefully), " Til
think of ammonia." Another old servant whose
mistress was about to give a small dinner-party
heard her speak of entries, and said, as a friendly
warning, "We can't have no on-trays, mum."
"Why not?" "We ain't got no nice trays to
hand 'em on." The same woman always called a
conversazione a conversation-only, and considered
it most illogical that refreshments should be
provided.

The physical gift most rarely found among wage-
earners is a pleasant voice. Those of them who

CHARACTERISTICS OF THE POOR 87

have been much in contact with their social
superiors are keenly conscious of the usual differ-
ence in quality, and in describing their impressions
of any lady or gentleman are far more likely to
comment on their manner of speaking than on
their personal appearance, which, indeed, often
passes unnoticed. " Her voice is like music ; I
could listen to it just for the sound of it, without
heeding what she was saying," was the remark of
a very brusque, noisy woman, with reference to an
ofl&cer's wife, noted in her own circle for her beauty,
but whose voice had always been taken as a matter
of course. A sweet voice is the possession most
earnestly coveted by a mother for her little girl ;
and if the child should chance to have one harsher,
shriller, huskier, or even louder than usual, it causes
more maternal distress than if its toes turned in or
its ears stuck out at right angles.

The gjeatpowera of passive endurance developed
by the working classes sliQwJtiieB^^
in the length of time that they can often support
severe illness in circumstances most unfavourable
to good nursing. Doctors unaccustomed to treat
the poor in their own homes almost invariably
underestimate the time that a dying patient will
linger. Occasionally, I know, the opinion offered
that " he will not be here very long," is merely a
pious fraud on their part, intended to stimulate

88 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

*

the natural aflfection of relatives whom they suspect
of laxity or indifference ; but the warning is
frequently uttered in cases where there can be no
question as to the complete devotion of those in
attendance on the sufferer.

This insufl&ciently recognised power has practical
consequences in nursing. I recollect one young
surgeon, fresh from hospital, horror-stricken over
the first patient he had ever seen dying of cancer
neglected until operation was impracticable, and
providing the most] elaborate dressings at his own
expense. I said to him warningly, " I know of at
least twelve similar cases ; you cannot continue to do
this. You will have to depend, as we do, on clean
boiled rags and boracic lotion. Although it seems
impossible, the woman may linger for years." He
would not listen ; but he was far from rich, and as
weeks and months passed by he sent smaller and
smaller supplies from his surgery. At last came
a day when the husband went to his house and
openly cursed him for sending so little. The
family had been entirely pauperised, and we could
not get them back on a self-supporting system,
and ultimately the patient had to be removed to
a Home for the Dying.

If charitable persons would but look around
them and realise how easy it is to pauperise
members of the middle classes with long genera-

CHARACTERISTICS OF THE POOR 89

tions of independence at their back, they would
not be in such haste to enfeeble the poor by
untimely assistance. I call to mind a school for
professional men's daughters, a certain proportion
of whom were elected pupils and educated for a
merely nominal sum. Wily parents could calculate
fairly well what chance their children had of
success, and at twelve or thirteen, or even later,
these girls arrived unable to read, or write, or spell,
or sew. After nearly thirty years' experience —
the brain of a Committee works more slowly than
that of the slowest person adorning it— it was
found so undesirable to place such a premium upon
neglect that the validity of the election had to be
subject to the girls' ability to pass an entrance
examination. How many children had been let
run wild on the off-chance of their election will
never be known.

Although covetousness is a rare failing among
I the English poor, they nevertheless set an unduly
high value upon money wages, and an unduly low
one upon favourable conditions of labour, and not
only for themselves, but for their children. Few
indeed are the parents who will choose light and
varied work, healthy surroundings, good moral
influences, and a prospect of rising, in preference to
heavy, monotonous labour carried on. in circum-
stances likely to injure health, morals, and brain

/

90 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

power, if there should be a difference of eighteen-
pence a week in the nominal wages. It is much
the same with girls in domestic service. The
lodging-house keeper is rarely without eager
applicants for the honour of serving her, while
quiet private famiUes have the greatest difficulty in
getting or keeping any servants. The temptation
here is not the regular wages, which would be from
twenty to a hundred per cent, higher in the private
family, but because of the " tips," any irregular
money gains affecting the imagination out of all
proportion to their average amount. Here and
there a wise mother protests, " She gets good wages,
and she spends 'em, jbut what is she learning ? Her
mistress don't teach her nothing"; but they are
voices in the wilderness.

If it were possible to give Council-school children
clear ideas as to the nature and uses of money, it
would be more valuable even than a knowledge of
cooking, or laundry-work, or baby-tending ; for all
these things " would be added unto them " in due
course. Misconceptions with regard to money lie
at the root of premature child-labour, the paid
labour of married women, and many another
economic error for which we all pay dearly in
mind, and body, and soul.

Past history furnishes us with many excuses
for the excessive value set by the poor upon money

CHARACTERISTICS OF THE POOR 91

wages : to have and to spend them is undoubtedly
an essential of liberty, and perhaps it would be
fairer to say that they set too low a value upon
favourable circumstances of labour than that they
think too much of its monetary reward. One has
only to live in districts where old customs linger
in order to realise the injustice that may even now
be done to a man who has to accept as part of his
wages a large garden which he has not the super-
fluous time and strength to cultivate, bacon that
he dislikes, and cider that he would be better
without.

I; have met one woman who estimated money
at its true value, and who insisted on removing
the husband "with one failing" from the town
where he earned £4 a week to a village where
he earned 35s., seven of which she saved.
"We've no children," she said, "and 28s. is
as much as we can spend without getting „into
mischief." Finding that even the dingy little
ale-house was too attractive for her husband,
she had a quart of beer sent in every evening,
and would invite any cheerful neighbour to
come and share it with him; and she professed
herself unable to get through the house work
or even the sewing without his assistance.
She has made a small world for him, and he
is so contented with it that her anxieties fade

92 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

more and more into the background of their daily
lives.

When one begins to know the poor intimately,
visiting the same houses time after time and
throughout periods of as long as eight or ten years,
one becomes gradually convinced that in the real
essentials of morality they are, as a whole, far more
advanced than is generally believed, but they
range the list of human virtues in a different order
from that commonly adopted by the more educated
classes. Generosity ranks far before justice,
sympathy before truth, love before chastity, a
pliant and obliging disposition before a rigidly
honest one. In brief, the less admixture of in-
tellect required for the practice of any virtue, the
higher it stands in popular estimation.

Men and women of the upper classes do not
realise the necessary conditions of poor people's
lives, and, if their time has been spent exclusively
among the well-to-do and comfortably housed, they
fail to grasp that much that they take for an
indispensable part of modesty and decency is only
a convention. Families living in two rooms, or
even one, are not necessarily more immoral than
those renting five, and they are often extremely
clean in person and surroundings.

Some years before I worked in Portsmouth,
Father Dolling roused national horror and local

CHARACTERISTICS OF THE POOR 93

indignation by the charges brought against the
inhabitants of certain of its districts. In the street
most scathingly attacked, consisting for the most
part of two-roomed dwellings, I have spent a great
many working hours, and although Father Polling's
influence in the town has almost as completely
passed away as if he had never existed, I found no
trace of the horrors that he denounced, and that
one of his oldest friends and disciples, a business
man in London, described to me in veiled words,
but with shudders of loathing. In another part of
the town bearing an exceedingly bad reputation I
found nothing to complain of but the repellent
manners of the denizens, and I soon learnt that
these were strictly kept for the outside world, the
inferiority of which, in every respect, is to them a
patent fact. Once given the entree, they treated
me as civilly as they did one another ; but there
was so much genuine kindness and social feeling
among them that there was seldom any occasion
for the services of a nurse.

The value commonly set upon an amiable and
obliging disposition leads to much hypocrisy. I
said to a girl of nineteen, finding that she had
attended the parish church, " I understand that
you and all your family are Baptists." "Yes,
m'm. I went out of respex to the parson."
Another Nonconformist, several years older

94 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

regularly attended the Roman Catholic chapel
to please her recently converted mistress, and
then offered to go to an Anglican church for my
personal gratification I

Perhaps hypocrisy is too strong a word to use,
as the poor rarely have any clear knowledge of
religious doctrines. I lived in one town where all
spoilt and wilful children, regardless of creed, were
jsent to the Roman Catholic day school, because the
discipline was more indulgent than at the Board
school. The mother of one of these little rebels
proudly asked me to hear "what a lovely lot of
texes our Gertie can say, and her on*y six last
August." The "texes" were the prayeisj invari-
ably taught to all young children of that faith, and
implied doctrines which the mother nominally held
in abhorrence.

Parents very generally allow their children to
choose their own Sunday school, and to visit two
or more if time permits, and possibly those opposed
to one another, not merely on matters of church
discipline, but on fundamental points of faith.
One little girl of ten, a sixteenth and uncanijily
clever child, did, however, overstep the boundaries
of rational freedom when she chose a Unitarian
school for the morning and a strongly ritualistic
Anglican one for the afternoon. Her mother was
seriously scandalised, and promised her a thrashing

CHARACTERISTICS OF THE POOR 95

every time she received instruction from the
Unitarians. She was an obstinate child^ but one
thrashing from a practised arm was enough. She
transferred her morning attendance to the Wes-
leyans, and her religious studies now cover less
widely extended ground.

Even when my patients are very far from
honourable, there is something disarming about
their childish naivete. Only the other day, in the
middle of explaining an elaborate plan for deceiving
her husband as to the profits of a certain bargain,
a married servant said to me, " Now, if I do say
Fll do a thing, I do do it, and everyone that do
know me will tell you the same. Now me husband,
he's not straight. If anyone do act fair with me,
I_do do the same with them." Another woman
told me plainly, " If anyone tries to do me, I does
them."

To be found out is probably the only thing that
brings home to the rank and file any clear con-
ception of wrong-doing; but do my patients
greatly differ in this from the children of the upper
classes, or — in many cases— from the parents of
those children ?

lesty amongJihfi.^or is too narrowly limited
in conception and practice, being generally con-
fined to the duty of abstaining from taking literal
possession of other people's goods ; but within these

96 FROM THEIR POINT OF PIEW

limits it is usually practised, and often in circum-
stances of the strongest temptation. Except in
certain rural districts, I have noted extreme
rigidity in this respect ; the only possible case in
which toleration would be shown would be in that
of a woman driven to steal in order to feed her
starving children.

Nevertheless, I should say that honesty is to
a great extent regarded as an ordinance of man,
and it scarcely takes as high a rank as the duty
pf Sabbath-keeping, for example. The rules with
regard to the latter are, however, complicated and
full of exceptions, as with all people and nations.
I remember an Indian general who went to spend
a week with an old schoolfellow, a Presbyterian
minister. On Sunday morning he accompanied
the family to church, and after the early dinner,
either forgetting the strictness of the Scottish
Sabbath or thinking that modern relaxation of
the discipline reaches farther than it does, asked
if he might take the two little girls for a walk.
There was a horrified negative from the minister,
and then the truly amazing concession : *' But ye
may tak' the boys. They're just from school,
and naebody kens them yet."

The persons most convinced that the degrada-
tion of the poor is not only increasing but is of
extremely modern origin, have been deluded by

CHARACTERISTICS OF THE POOR 97

the fact that they are brought into close personal
contact with a much lower stratum of society than
formerly, and they are unconsciously contrasting the
poor of the present day with those of a past day
decidedly above them in station.

Few people are as clear-sighted in the matter
as a lady now between seventy and eighty years
of age who said to me, " When I first married,
my servants were the daughters of small farmers
and shopkeepers. Later on I had the daughters of
artisans. Now I have the daughters of labourers,
sometimes even of casual labourers, and lately I
have had several brought up in workhouses, or
rescued from notoriously bad surroundings.^ How
absurd it would be to expect that, simply because
the education of the lowest classes has considerably
improved during the last thirty-five years, my
present servants can equal in good sense or
physique the ones that I used to have. The girls
who would have been my servants in the old
days are not extinct or * degenerate'; they are
Board-school teachers, cashiers, milliners, post-office
clerks, mothers' helps, and nursery governesses. I
have lost, but they have gained; and the untrained
labourers' daughters, who become civilised in a
house that formerly they would have had no
chance of entering, have gained most of all."

**The human mind is hospitable," and side by
7

98 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

side with the belief in the physical degeneracy of
the poor lies the expectation that the poorer and
barer a home is, the stronger will be the persons
brought up in it and the more capable of hard
work. This is entirely contrary to my experience.
The power of unintelligent drudgery, of what
working lads call ** slogging away," may some-
times be developed in poverty-stricken homes, but
whenever I have found a poor man or woman
endowed with energy as well as endurance,
I have always found either that they were
members of a small family, or the youngest
children of their parents, or that they were
closely connected with the class immediately
above them. Perhaps the last of these conditions
is most frequently the determining factor. It
would be difficult to say whether, as a nation,
we owe most to the members of the middle
classes who have risen above their station, to
those who have maintained themselves in it,
or to those who have intermarried with wage-
earners, lending them fresh health, and strength,
and vigour. I remember being amazed by the
fierce, untiring energy with which, from year's
end to year's end, a woman worked for eight
turbulent boys, nursed and protected three fragile
little girls, and managed to hold her own against
a violent and brutal husband. One day I

CHARACTERISTICS OF THE POOR 99

happened to see her handwriting, and then leamt
that she was the daughter of a prosperous shop-
keeper, cast off for her mesalliance with an artisan.
More recently I came across the wife of an
agricultural labourer, aged forty-three and mother
of several nearly grown-up children, but who still
possessed a considerable number of sound white
teeth, a fair amount of silky brown hair, a good
figure, and an excellent complexion, who kept her
own well-furnished cottage in perfect order, and
was always ready for a hard day's charing or
washing ; in short, with the appearance and more
than the physical strength of a matron of the
upper classes. I was surprised to learn that her
father had been in the same position as her
husband, but on further questioning her I found
that her mother had been the daughter of a
butcher, and that none of the three children (of
whom she was the only survivor) had been born
until six or seven years after the marriage, by
which time the rate of weekly wages had increased,
and she added, with affectionate pride, " Although
father was poor, and poor all his days, a kinder
nor a better father never lived."
f One of the principal charges brought against
/ the poor, founded on much newspaper and chari-
table report reading, is that they are cruel to
animals and most fiendishly cruel to children. In

loo FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

all my experience I doubt if I have come across as
many as twelve cruelly used children ; not one of
those was persistently ill-treated, and in the worst
case the child on being separated from her madly
violent mother cried and fretted almost inconsolably.
Moreover, in every instance the guilty person
showed unmistakable signs of mental weakness,
though it must be owned that in a certain pro-
portion the provoking cause of this weakness was
excessive drinking.

With regard to animals, much that is stigmatised
as cruelty arises from pure ignorance, and could
have been prevented by a little timely instruction.
In a country district I had been disturbed by the
almost incessant howling of a half-grown puppy,
evidently kept on the chain. At last I tracked
the sound to a disused stable adjoining the cottage
of a most worthy old couple. "Whose dog is
it ? " I asked. " Oh, it's Mr. Kay's dog, what lives
at the house at the corner." "But his house
has been shut up for some time ? " " Yes ; he
was called away sudden to his brother what had
had a bad accident, and he asked us to mind the
dog. He said he'd only be a few days, but it's
close on seven weeks now. We tied the dog in
the stable. We couldn't have 'un in the house."
" No, I suppose not ; but he cries a great deal
I can hear him half a mile away." " We feeds 'un

CHARACTERISTICS OF THE POOR loi

reglar." " I am quite sure of that, but dogs are
such restless creatures. Do you never let him out
for a run ? " " We be afraid of losing 'un. They
do say he be worth a lot." " I should like to see
him." Rather unwillingly, they led me in. The
stable floor was of cobble-stones, and bare except
for a thick coating of filth. Tied to a post by a
stout rope scarcely a yard long was a collie of not
more than five months old. Without waiting for
permission I unbuckled his collar, and he rushed
through the open door on to the meadow, but had
scarcely gone thirty yards when he stumbled and
fell, and at the first call he returned to me.
Impressed to some extent by my remonstrances
and assurances, but chiefly by the sobriety and
dejection with which he trotted along, they
promised to leave the dog unchained, and the old
man soon became accustomed to take it with him
as he went to and fro from his work. By the
time his owner returned the animal was in fairly
good condition, but never entirely outgrew the
deformity produced by the constant straining on
the rope.

One admirable though often most illogical trait

among the English poor is their unhesitating,

instinctive championship of the weaker side.

" Hit him hard ; he's got no friends ! " was never

i uttered except as the wildest jest. It has been

102 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

well observed that vce victis has never become
a familiar tag of Latin in any English-speaking
country. I remember a French waiter asked by a
too vehement mees to " run and do " something for
her, rejoining solemnly, "Mademoiselle, if I ran,
I might fall down ; if I fell, I might break my leg ;
if I broke my leg, all the world would cry quel
imbecile ! " — a judgment that would certainly not
suggest itself to any of my patients or their
friends.

On perceiving that the balance of kindliness does
not turn exactly as our prejudices would have
led us to believe, the more highly developed
nervous system of the educated classes will be
brought forward in our defence ; but when one
considers the many alleviations of life among the
well-to-do, and the ceaseless irritations, embitter-
ments, and hardships among the poor, there is little
reason to accuse them or to excuse ourselves.
/ On first acquaintance, the poor strike one as
/singularly deficient in worldly wisdom, often
seeming to be without even that rudimentary
sense which would show them "which side their
bread is buttered." One may modify the opinion
later on, but I doubt if the bulk of them are as far
advanced in the art as the average child of the
upper classes. My first lesson in it was received
from a little girl who — most deservedly, no doubt

CHARACTERISTICS OF THE POOR 103

— afterwards became a bishop's wife. She had
acquired great credit among all the mothers and
aunts in the parisE by devoting herself every
Sunday afternoon to the care of her two little
next-door neighbours — fat, heavy, over-dressed,
uninteresting children of four and six. I was
among her admirers myself, until one fatal after-
noon when I was sent with a message to her mother,
who asked me to go and sit with "that dear
good Fanny " while she wrote a reiply. " That dear
good Fanny " was seated in a comfortable arm-chair
in the cool, shady drawing-room, reading aloud to
her two proteges, who were seated bolt upright on
high chairs with their fat white legs and shiny
buttoned boots dangling miserably. I knew the
book she was reading, and felt a pang of pity for
the weary victims of her kindness, and protested,
"Fanny, Fm sure they can't understand a word
of it." " Hush ! Don't tell them that. I want to
read it myself" I returned home to my own
story-book, freed from self-reproach, and able to
hear what a " most unselfish girl Fanny is " without
forming any virtuous resolutions — so uncomfortable
either to make or break.

Nevertheless, I believe that the poor have a
nameless sense of the infinite complications and
interweavings of their own social life, and that it
is this, quite as much as any baser quality, which

I04 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

produces the extreme slowness and indirectness
with which the average member of the working
classes deals with any difficulty not exclusively
affecting his own family. The would-be reformer,
after listening to their complaints, asks with
impatient wonder, "Have you told the police?"
"Have you sent for the sanitary inspector?" and
rages over the impossibility of making any head-
way against what may to a great extent be in-
stinctive worldly wisdom.

Procrastinatio n is th e rule, not the exception,
among all uneducated persons, and it adds ^eatly
to the severity and danger of any acute illness by
which they or their children may be attacked, and
is one of the most fruitful causes of blindness and
deformity. It often takes weeks and months to
persuade a mother that certain treatment ought
to be undergone by one of her children. As long
as her mental and moral objections hold out, one's
patience may last ; but it is apt to give way under
the unexpected strain of discovering that however
close the tie may be between conviction and inaction,
there is no necessary connection between conviction
and active measures .of any useful kind whatever.

Although there is a measureless amount of
passive endurance among the poor, there is little
courage of a stirring and enterprising nature.
They can repel, but they rarely attack; they can

CHARACTERISTICS OF THE POOR 105

bear cruel pain, but make no vigorous or toilsome
eflfort to remove its cause. At heart they are
fatalists, and consider the struggle for amelioration
impious as well as useless. They watch the strivings
of the vigorous-minded minority with dismal fore-
\ bodings and prophecy. Success proves nothing, but
\ when failure comes — as it sometimes must even to
\the bravest and strongest — the sight rivets their
iphains afresh, and seems to afford an almost in-
explicable sense of satisfaction.

Nevertheless, while unbounded credulity remains
such a marked mental peculiarity among the poor,
one should be thankful for the width of the gulf
that exists between vehement belief and even the
tamest action. Domestic and civic peace would be
ceaselessly endangered if it were not for this saving
weakness of temperament.

IV

Our Masters' Rulers

Our masters are not really our masters, for the
simple reason that they find it too much trouble ;
but their rulers love dominion, and exercise it
rigorously all through childhood and youth,
though generally with decreasing severity as they
rise in years. There is a general prejudice among
the rich that the poor are bad-tempered, especially
the men, and that the children suflfer accordingly ;
but no close observer will admit that there is any
wide foundation for the opinion.

I remember hearing the captain of a training
ship say of a man whose duty it was to give very
elementary instruction in seamanship, ** I shall land
that fellow Black as soon as I can. I feel sure he
drinks; he is so irritable with the boys in the
morning." How many upper-class schoolmasters
would be convicted of drinking to excess if this
were the test ! Taken as a whole, the labouring
classes are better-tempered by nature than the

«o6

OUR MASTERS' RULERS 107

professional classes, freer from all forms of nervous
irritability and less exigeant, and they often ac-
quire great self-command under provocation. A
young girl was complaining at home of what she
had to " put up with " in her place, and her grey-
haired father, who for the sake of wife and children
had managed never to be a day out of work for
nearly thirty years, said with such kindness and
melancholy that she never forgot it, " My dear, if
you knew the insults that / have to put up
with ! "

The poor are perhaps chiefly misjudged in this
respect owing to their voice, which is ordinarily
of a harsh or thin quality, and over which they
quickly lose such small command as they ever
acquire. It must be owned that this equable
temper is partly a quality of their defects. The
anger of an educated person is often more easily
roused because he has the clear and instant vision
of the full consequences of an act which is denied
to a less cultured imagination, or because it offends
an aestheticism, or a sense of abstract justice, or an
idealism entirely alien to the working-man's sphere
of thought and feeling.

The popular idea of a working-class mother is of
a person always threatening her children with
bodily chastisement, while the father inflicts it
heavily and frequently, whether with or without

io8 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

these loudly shouted warnings. In literature of
an evangelical-sentimental type, the mother, more
especially if a consumptive widow or the wife of a
drunkard, is often allowed an almost impossible
range of virtues ; but it is rare for any father
below a tolerably well-defined rank in society to be
allowed any merits at all. After many years' close
acquaintance with them, the chief complaint that
I have to make against the ordinary father and
mother is of weak and excessive indulgence
towards their children, and the rarity with which
they make any steady or serious attempts to
inculcate obedience. Frequently a young child's
response to an unwelcome command from its
mother is a slap or a kick, delivered with all its
puny strength, and the renowned Bella Wilfer is
by no means the only person who has used her
bonnet to discipline a father of a rougher type
than the Cherub. One day last summer an artisan
drove seven miles to do an hour's work at my
house. He brought a boy of five, and left him
in the garden with strict orders to remain there.
Four times in about twenty minutes the child
interrupted his father by creeping into the hall
and uttering loud and insistent cries of " Dad ! "
The fourth time the father carried him out,
threatening punishment if he returned. " Til give
you a goo' smack if you don't mind what you're

OUR MASTERS' RULERS 109

about," was the prompt retort — which finally
provoked a slap that might have disturbed a grain
of dust, but certainly would not have alarmed a
house-fly. The child cried, chiefly from anger.
"YouVe got to learn 'em," said the father, in
rueful apology.

If the unbounded indulgence merely lasted for
the first few years, and if the ways of spoilt
babies were silently dropped at the age of six or
seven, as we are assured they are in Japan, and as
we can see for ourselves that they are in France,
the matter might not be of much consequence ; but
although the particular forms in which the uncon-
trolled self-will is exhibited generally change when
the children reach school age and come under school
discipline for a few hours every day, the root of the
evil remains. Obedience and the freedom found
in submission to lawful authority have never been
learnt, and all through their lives the children
must suffer from this lack of early training. No
warning seems severe enough to afiect the parents.
In one many-childed household the utter defiance
of the three youngest chUdren and the wilfulness
of the remainder appeared to be a standing joke
to both father and mother. A year ago a girl of
fourteen stole a candle from the kitchen drawer
and used it (without a candlestick) to read by
after she was in bed. She fell asleep, and woke

no FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

enveloped in flames. The poor child suffered
terribly and has entirely lost the use of one arm,
but no change is observable in the parents' system
of education, I found that the only lesson that an
intelligent girl of nine had been able, unaided, to
draw from the occurrence was that " mother hadn't
ought to of sent her to bed so early."

As an example of the almost incredible extent
to which the children are spoilt : a lad, just of
working age, and the son of most frugal and
industrious parents, went to " live in " at a small
livery stable six miles from his home. A few
weeks later the master's wife heard that his father
was dangerously ill, and at once offered him a
day's leave to go and see his parents, and gave
him a present of two shillings to take to his
mother, and several little things for the younger
children. She gathered from indistinct mutterings
and grumblings that he did not choose to walk so
far, and told him that he might ride what was called
the "old horse," not on account of decrepitude,
as it was still in full work, but to distinguish it
from two which had been more recently purchased.
The boy asked to have the "young horse"
instead, and when his mistress demurred, as it
was an animal worth quite £50, declared sulkily
that he would not go at all unless he could
have it. The mistress finally yielded, because

OUR MASTERS' RULERS iii

she thought the parents would be cruelly wounded
by his heartlessness if he stayed away, and nothing
would have induced her to mention his conduct
to them. The tale was related by the boy directly
he reached home, and he was highly applauded
by both parents for his "spirity behaviour."

In all times of illness the results of previous
indulgence come prominently into view, and are
almost impossible to combat. When father or
mother is ill in bed, the usual system with regard
to the children seems to be to bribe them to
remain out of doors from morning till night. It
is rare to find any boy or any girl under thirteen
who make themselves of use on these occasions,
or who do not seize the opportunity of being
" more than common " troublesome, not from cal-
culated malice, but from sheer indiscipline.

With regard to the children themselves, these
results are often fatal. In one instance, two much-
spoiled brothers of nine and eleven had severe
attacks of scarlatina. The elder was removed to
a fever hospital, where, overawed by strangers,
he yielded implicit obedience and made a good
recovery. The younger boy began by refusing
all medicine and ended by refusing all nourish-
ment, and died on the ninth day of his illness, to
the lasting and intense grief of his parents. A
private nurse who had had much experience with

112 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

boys told me that obstinate refusal of food is common
among them when suflFering from scarlet fever. I
asked her how she dealt with it, and she said, " If
the doctor says they must eat, I stand by the
bedside, and tell them that however long they
keep me waiting, I cannot leave them for a
moment until his orders are obeyed." But in
cottage homes no one with the leisure or the
determination is to be found.

The difficulty of getting children to eat nourish-
ing food is always present, but reaches its height
when they are thirteen or fourteen. In well-to-
do wbrking-class homes anaemia is sadly prevalent,
and it is chiefly due to lack of all discipline with
regard to meals. The children eat what they like
and when they like, and then at fifteen or sixteen
the distressed parents have to spend their hardly
earned and hardly saved money on Burgundy,
chicken, and fish.

The parents, especially the mother, are not
always entirely disinterested; they are to some
extent aflfected by the common fallacy that the
more you do for anyone the more grateful you
may expect him to be. I have never been able
to discover any proportion between benefits
bestowed and gratitude experienced. When
people enduring a neglected and poverty-stricken
old age have told me that they " sacrificed every-

OUR MASTERS* RULERS 113

thing for their children," I have sometimes
wondered what "everything" was, and whether
they had any right to sacrifice it.

I have often been asked if I believed it to be
possible for ordinary wage-earners to provide for
their old age. To answer such a question with
any fulness would require special study; I can
only reply that nearly everyone could make some
provision, and that those who do already make
some provision might easily make more. I
maintain that the younger children of a family
are nearly always less happy than the elder, and
yet money is constantly lavished upon them which
ought to have been saved for their parents'
declining years. As soon as the eldest child is
self-supporting, the parents should begin to
think of themselves, even if they cannot do so
from the very beginning of their married life.
When I have seen parents providing bicycles,
pianos, sUk blouses, and many other things that
the elder ones of the family never had or missed,
paying for music lessons, and allowing serious
work to be indefinitely pos;poned, I have reminded
them of the wholesomely .bitter old German
proverb : " One father can support twelve children,
but twelve children cannot support one father."

In cases where I have known them and all

their circumstances really well, I have sometimes
8

114 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

ventured on a still more personal form of argu-
ment, and asked, " What reason have you to
believe that your children will be more willing to
support you in your old age than you have been
to support your parents in theirs ? According to
their power, your parents did as much for you, and
you acknowledge that they treated you kindly.
Consult your own heart and your own memory,
and be warned in time. Give your children only
what is fair and right, provide for yourselves, and
your old age will be respected as it should be.
Your children will be all the happier, and you will
take a proper position with regard to your grand-
children. Can you bear to think that you will
live to be treated as you see other old people
treated — your little habits scoflFed at, your opinions
set at naught? It is not by bribery and over-
indulgence that you will save yourselves from
such a fate. If you had but half a crown a week
of your own for life, you would find that it was
'worlds away' from having nothing."

But they are deaf. And not only parents are
lacking in foresight, for the comparatively few
unmarried women are just as unwise in their
attitude towards nephews and nieces. In one
house (rented at five shillings a week) where there
was an especial abundance of cameras, musical
instruments, sewing-machines, etc., I was told :

OUR MASTERS' RULERS 115

" Their aunt gives 'em to 'em. She's no one else
to think of, bein' an old maid, as you may say."
In her case there was not even a decent pretence
that gratitude would ever arise in the recipients !

That "children must not suflFer" is the pass-
word of every educationist of the present day, and
because their predecessors expressed themselves
differently, they dare to doubt that their love and
solicitude were as great. The old-fashioned parent
tried to keep his children from suffering by brac-
ing and hardening their feelings and discouraging
undue sensitiveness ; the modern parent tries to
save them by protecting them from everything
that could wound that sensitiveness. Let us be
just, and own that one method fails as often as
the other did ; less is done that could hurt . the
children's feelings, but it takes less and less to
wound their almost morbid susceptibilities.

Some years since an occasion for national
mourning occurred suddenly. In a village where
I happened to be staying the day was to have been
one of local rejoicing. A married woman, mother
of several children, said to me, " The Committee
have indefinitely postponed all the entertainments
except the tea and sports for the children, which
are to take place as arranged. I do not call it
right: it is a time of sorrow, and why are the
children not to bear their share ? " Remembering

ii6 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

the keenness of childish disappointments, I was
inclined to think her hard, but I recognise now
that to have shared — even involuntarily — ^in their
country's grief would have been a dignified memory
throughout their lives. Some months later the
postponed rejoicings took place, and, to my friend's
renewed indignation, a fresh entertainment was
provided for the children. " The Committee have
sunk even below the level of teaching them that
you cannot eat your cake and keep it too ! " she
protested.

And even if it were right, is it practicable to
exempt childhood from suflfering? In my youth
I heard many of my contemporaries say, "My
children shall never suflFer as I have done " ; but
when the time came, not only did they learn that
education is a much more complicated matter than
they had supposed, but their children were so
unlike themselves that the simple plan — the only
one with which they were prepared — of reversing
the system^ on which they themselves had been
brought up, was doomed to failure. They, perhaps,
had suflfered from dulness, monotony, and repres-
sion ; are their children's griefs and grievances any
less real because they are chiefly connected with
excitement and over-stimulation ? " When the
mind's at ease, the body's delicate," and when the
body is at ease, the mind is often too susceptible

OUR MASTERS' RULERS 117

to every passing cloud. Leaving all extremes of
harshness and severity and unbending rigidity of
system out of the question, it is open to doubt
whether children treated with invariable tender-
ness do not suffer far more acutely than those
who meet with less meticulous care and considera-
tion. I read a long story the other day of a
mother who spent hours over the weighty question
as to whether, and when, and how, she could
venture to warn her little daughter against the ugly
habit of sniffing ! Among all classes I have found
a hypersensitiveness among indulgently treated
children which quite turned the balance with
regard to their happiness. I call to mind especi-
ally the families of two country labourers living
about a hundred yards apart. In the one household
the mother anxiously avoided what she called
"hardening" the children, with the result that
she could not speak sharply to any one of them
without exciting floods of tears, followed by
mental depression lasting for the rest of the day.
In the other cottage father and mother alike were
ready with hand and tongue, but not one of the
family was ever known to be out of spirits for half
an hour at a time. One of them, aged ten, told
me cheerfully : "I used to have a hiding 'most
every day because I was so mistiful [mischievous],
but it's Bob who gets the most lickings now."

ii8 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

Perhaps one reason why the poor are apt to
over-indulge their children is because they see so
much of them that they are unconscious of their
failings. Boys and girls of the upper classes
are frequently told that the less they are seen and
heard by their elders, especially their father, the
better they will be liked ; and those who tell them
this seem to believe that because working-men have
to see and hear so much of their children, day and
night, that they must inevitably love them little.
This is an entire mistake : the more men see of
young children, outside working hours, the better
they understand them and the stronger their attach-
ment. Sailors, although from certain points of view
good fathers, are on the whole cool and indifferent
to their children, intensely critical, and inclined to
be extremely jealous of them ; soldiers are more
demonstratively affectionate fathers and more
tolerant of childish weaknesses, but cannot well
bear comparison with civilians. Among civilians,
again, the man with long and uncertain hours of
work never cares as much for his family as the man
who rarely leaves home before they are awake and
returns before they are asleep.

" Except on Sundays, and perhaps for a short
time in the summer, I never see my children by
daylight," complained a civilian father. " What's
that ? " growled a sailor sourly. " Often for three

OUR MASTERS' RULERS 119

years at a stretch I haven't seen mine by any kind
of light at all."

In all ranks of life the sailor father is to be pitied,
as he is commonly regarded as an intruder. I
remember a little girl of five years old going to a
favourite aunt the day after her father's return from
foreign service with the fretful complaint : " That
Cwoth old man has come to my howth again ! "
Quite recently a boy of seven connected with the
same family asked his nurse anxiously, " When is
that cross old man going away again ? " In the
first case the father was about forty, and in the
second considerably under that age.

Notwithstanding the indulgence of working-class
fathers to young children, and the general absence
of any severity when they are older, mothers almost
invariably rank first in the children's affection. A
man who had been a mission worker for twenty
years, specially devoting himself to young people
past the age of childhood, told me : " If at a
prayer-meeting I ask, 'For whom shall I pray?'
the answer comes like a shot : * For mother.' I
have to prompt and suggest before they add * and
father.' "

Mothers sometimes weary of the constant
presence of their children, and for this reason
shortened church services or brief attendances at
Sunday school are not approved of, "A nower,

I20 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

or a nowner'n a quarter at the outside; why, it
ain't worth dressin' 'em for. They're back again
worritin' before Fve time to look round." On the
other hand, short services are greatly appreciated
by young men and women. One girl expressed
the general regret over a certain clergyman's pro-
longed illness, and the great dissatisfaction with
his substitute. As he had been many years in the
parish, I took this for affection and loyalty until
she explained : " Rector he do do it over faster.
We had ought to be out by ten minutes to eight
hy rights:'

I think there can be no doubt that the co-
education now so common in elementary schools,
especially in the country, does much to raise the
standard of courage among girls — I mean courage of
the kind that resists personal unkindness. In mere
daring I have always found young country girls
incontestably the superiors of their brothers and
cousins, and the quality shows itself more particu-
larly in their bold handling of animals ; they will
deal fearlessly with strange dogs, or harness strange
ponies, when a lad of the same age shrinks nervously
at every suspicious movement, asking, '* Will it bite?
Does it kick ? " But this quality is quite distinct
from the courage demanded to resist an injury that
also inflicts an inward wound. A girl educated at
one of these schools told me that a certain womaa's

OUR MASTERS' RULERS 121

husband beat her sometimeTs. I expressed great
commiseration. " But," she added, " she isn't a bit
afraid o' he. If he do give her a good smack, she do
give he another," and I gathered that this was the
usual custom in the neighbourhood if husbands so
far forgot themselves, which was rather rare.

Altogether a prouder type of character is fostered,
for the same girl, told me : " When mother slapped
me, she did use to say I was hardened because I
didn't never cry. I always did cry afterwards, but
I wouldn't let she see me."

In considering the children of the working classes,
one warning is especially necessary if we would pro-
nounce a just verdict : the rich are apt to judge the
poor too exclusively by the conduct of the young.
The general argument appears to be : " Huge sums
of money and enormous eflFort have^been expended
upon the education of these girls and boys, and yet
they are rough, noisy, coarse, idle, ungrateful, and
with no thought of the future. How much worse
their elders must be, how much worse they them-
selves will be in a few years' time, when all trace of
school discipline has vanished ! " Are their own chil-
dren at the age of sixteen or eighteen all that they
would like them to be ? Are they as useful, or even
as generally agreeable, members of society as they
may be confidently expected to become during the
following ten or fifteen years ? Then how can they

%

122 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

expect the early training of the poor to be so perfect
and complete that there is no room left for the work
wrought by experience ? With the poor as with the
rich life is the great teacher, and education is only
the attempt, more or less well adapted, to place
children in such a position and to supply them with
such principles that they will rapidly profit by the
lessons which in the course of nature must come
to them.

It should never be forgotten that the children of
the poor are not born grown up, nor are they even
precocious ; physically, mentally, and morally they
are slower in development than those bom of long
generations of educated men and women ; and how
faulty and imperfect the latter are we know from
conscience, observation, and personal memory.

Some of the Causes of Infant Mortality

When the general public is worked up to a
momentary interest in the fact that fifty thousand
infants of less than a year old have died in one
town within ten years, they seem to form the
impression that this implies the existence of fifty
thousand mothers ignorant, careless, cruel, or in
a state of helpless poverty. They are under a
delusion somewhat resembling that which made
a lady say to an elderly widow, " Two thousand
divorces ! That means four thousand whole families
tainted and disgraced, perhaps sixty or seventy
members in each, besides the two thousand homes
utterly broken up." " My dear," she replied, " you
cannot calculate it in that way. Divorce and
separation and elopement, and all that kind of
thing, run in families like gout or consumption or
shadiness in money matters. A single family in a
single generation may supply a dozen instances."
In district work I have rarely been in a house

"3

i

124 FRQM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

half an hour before I am told how many children
the mother has, the number she has lost, if any,
their age at death, and its immediate cause. Over
and over again I find families of all sizes, from two
and three up to fourteen or fifteen, unbroken by the
death of a single child under the age of ten years.
On the other hand, within a very short space of
time I came across a girl of nineteen who had
already lost three infants ; young women of twenty-
four and twenty-five (cousins) who had each done
the same ; a woman of twenty-eight who had
" buried six " ; an older woman who had lost eleven,
** only one of them old enough to say * ma ' " ; and
another who had lost fourteen out of eighteen.
Six women had thus already accounted for thirty
premature deaths. As more than half of them
were young, and even the eldest openly expressed
her desire to have three more children, " So's I can
say IVe had twenty-one," while showing complete
indifference as to whether they and the miserable
remnant of the eighteen lived or died, they will
probably at least double this death-roll before
their own lives end.

In the present outcry with regard to infant
mortality it seems also to be taken for granted
that the death of every infant might, with a
reasonable amount of maternal care, have been
prevented, and that its continued existence would

CAUSES OF INFANT MORTALITY 125

necessarily have been a joy to itself, a satisfaction
to its family, and a benefit to the community. If
it dies, al] the blame is thrown upon the mother,
and little or no attention is given either to prenatal
conditions, which cause the birth of so many infants
unfitted to struggle with the ordinary difficulties
of human existence, or to general surroundings, over
which the mother has practically no control, and
which may nullify her most anxious and pains-
taking efforts. A large proportion of the direct
attempts to save infant life are doomed to failure
because the feeble little plants will wither whatever
is done for them, or are injurious to the State
because they will prolong miserable existences to
the period of childhood or early youth, or in the
" successful " instances enable them to live just
long enough for their progeny to continue the
enormous death-rate and to fill workhouse schools
and orphan asylums with physically and mentally
defective children. The already discredited pana-
cea — sterilised milk, the provision of pure milk,
incubators, etc. — are about as useful as ointment on
a broken leg. What we have to do is to improve
the general conditions of life, and then healthy
babies will be born, and will hold their own against
the normal number of germs without any scientific
tampering with their fL.

A healthy infant, wherever it makes its appear-

126 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

ance, is an extraordinarily tough little creature,
but, as someone remarked before bacilli were knowii
to dance by the million on every needle's point,
** Babes are fed on milk and praise." Unless the
mother is healthy, they cannot have the first ; and
unless all her time is given up to her family, they
cannot have the last. In homes where wives are
not wage-earners, the children are all bom kings
and queens, and reign absolutely until deposed by
their successor, and even then they still reign over
some aunt or grandmother or childless neighbour.

The working-class mother is too commonly
addressed as if infant-rearing were as simple and
certain a matter as the addition of two and two.
Cases often occur where she may be excused for
believing that it is a much more complicated
problem that she is called on to solve, and |}iat
some of the factors are not only unknown to her
and her critics, but are extremely obscure to
scientists. Just eighteen months ago, a boy and
a girl were bom during the same spell of bitter
wintry weather, in cottages side by side, each with
the same damp stone-paved kitchen and the same
wretched, fireless bedrooms. Boy and girl alike
were the eighth children of women well over forty
years of age, and were received by the same
untrained midwife. The boy's mother was drunk
many times during the months preceding his birth.

CAUSES OF INFANT MORTALITY 1 2 7

and had several furious quarrels with her husband,
a heavy drinker (not a drunkard) and a very
violent man. He had knocked her down at least
three times, and once at midnight, armed with a
knife, had chased her round the back yard threaten-
ing to kill her. The house and everything
connected with it was indescribably dirty, and
cooking was a totally neglected art. The woman
was drunk when the child was born, drunk two
days after his birth, and walking about the village
a week later. When the boy was a few months
old she was often so stupid with drink that, as the
neighbours expressed it, " She don't know the poor
child's head from its heels." One man assured me
that he had met her carrying it head downwards,
and another father of a much-cherished family
told me : "It made me shiver to see her handle the
poor little beggar. I took it from her arms and
roared at her to try and bring her to her senses."
When the child was vaccinated, she was in such a
condition that with the doctor's eye still upon her
she deliberately wiped away the vaccine from its
arm. For some totally inexplicable reason, that
boy was born healthy, and has remained so, and
there is every prospect of his growing up.

The girl-baby had dober parents of a kind and
affectionate disposition. As soon as her arrival
was even distantly anticipated, the mother gave up

128 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

her only bad habit — an occasional heavy day's
scouring or washing for a neighbouring farmer's
wife— and the husband, who wa^ very boyish for
his forty odd years, relinquished his favourite
amusement, " taking rises out of the missus," and
lent a willing hand in the house work. The child
was idolised and waited on by the entire family ;
** If she was a queen," said the neighbours, " they
couldn't do more for her." The father even insisted,
a most unusual precaution among the poor, that
she was to be taken out of doors twice a day,
weather permitting, and that she was to go at
least a mile away, " and not always be breathing
the air round about the house." Nevertheless, she
was continually ailing, and died four months ago.
How soothing it will be for those parents if some
morning a girl health visitor arrives to instruct the
mother, or — an infinitely worse and more galling
insult — the Mayor of the nearest town oflFers her a
guinea if her next child should attain the age of
twelve months !

A favourite suggestion, intended to cope with
the ignorance of the lowest class of mother, is to
teach the care of babies to all little girls at an
age when decent working-class parents pride them-
selves on their children's complete ignorance of the
physical facts of life. It may or may not be an error
of judgment on their part, but we have no more

CAUSES OF INFANT MORTALITY 129

right to force such instruction upon their children
with what they consider unseemly prematureness
than we have to instU rigid dogmatic religion
with equal unsuitability to their state of mental
development. Such matters are best taught at
continuation schools, at lectures on nursing, mothers'
meetings, etc. In private houses, if the husband
was less ignorant and prejudiced than the wife, I
sometimes found it best to bestow all instruction
upon him, and leave him to see that it was put
into practice. Men of the upper classes do not
in the least realise how much working-men care
for their infant children, and how much they do
for them. In numberless homes, if the baby gets
a scratch or a bruise, or meets with any of the
almost inevitable ups and downs of child life, the
mother's first exclamation is : " What'U her father
say when he comes home ? " And it is often the
father's powers as cook and sick nurse which
decide whether an ailing infant and its suffering
mother shall live or die.

With regard to needless and avoidable loss of
infant life, one of the most fruitful causes is
illegitimacy. What the mental and moral value
might have been of the enormous number of
nameless children who perish from neglect,
poverty, ignorance, or wilful cruelty, no one can
presume to say, but a very large proportion of
9

I30 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

them are the offspring of young and vigorous
persons^ and as a class they are bom healthy and
with physical powers rather above than below the
average. The usual poverty of the mother, and the
practical impossibility of at once earning a living
for a child and taking care of it night and day,
account for many deaths, ignorance for many
more, but lack of affection and a bitter sense of
injustice probably cause most of all. Maternal love
is largely supported by maternal pride and by all
the props of family life, and can rarely stand
without them. Except in sentimental fiction, the
unmarried mother seldom pays her child all the
compensating tenderness that she owes to it, and
the father s duties are as a rule entirely evaded.
Even if marriage subsequently takes place between
the parents, I believe it would be found upon
examination that the death-rate among these
eldest children, and the physical condition of the
survivors — a point of more lasting importance —
would not bear comparison with that of their
younger brothers and sisters. As an experienced
Londoner briefly expressed the matter : " Talk o'
stepmothers, why, they aren't in it with womei^
whoVe got a child born before marriage and a
child born after. If the first one lives — and most
often it don't — it's just a slave to the others."
Anything that tends to the reduction of illegiti-

CAUSES OF INFANT MORTALITY 131

macy — ^whether improved general education, the
efficient protection of weak-minded girls, higher
wages of women, or earlier marriage of men — must
also tend to the reduction of infant mortality.

One source of loss is too commonly overlooked
or underrated. If a poor woman dies in her con-
finement, the child almost invariably follows her
within a period measured at most by weeks. Nor
is this all. The surviving children rarely fail to
suffer in health, the younger ones from want of
maternal care and love, the elder ones from over-
work and mental overstrain. Most of these
deaths are not merely preventable but easily pre-
ventable, as every doctor and skilled midwife
knows. A, little more rest, a little more warmth,
a little more cleanliness of the plain soap-and- water
and open-window description, and these lives and
all that depended upon them would have been
saved.

The paid labour of married women, more
especially of factory workers, leads inevitably to
great loss of infant life, and lasting injury to the
originally vigorous survivors. The mother who
has nothing to do but look after her home and her
children does not invariably do it, but the factory
hand cannot^ even if she destroys her own health
in the ceaseless struggle to accomplish duties not
only excessive but incompatible. One of my

132 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

earliest social recollections is of overhearing a
highly placed official relate, with much feeling,
how a pretty and healthy baby of seven months
old had literally fretted itself to death, while its
mother — sorely against her will — had worked ten
hours a day in a rope factory for wages of ten
shillings a week

How can a mother possibly aflFord to pay for as
good attendance for her children as she could give
them herself if she remained at home ? And if she
cannot do this, what profit is there in her work ?
If the child is left at home, the probability is that
it is under the charge of some person either young
and ignorant or old and feeble, or why should they
accept the work and the rate of payment ? There
are fundamental objections to crfeches as to every
means of palliating and therefore prolonging evUs
that need not exist, but I will simply mention an
obvious and practical one, which ought to appeal to
every mother. In order to benefit by a crfeche,
infants have to be carried through the streets at times
fixed by the mother's working hours and entirely re-
gardless of weather or the season of the year.

Home industries are injurious to child life, and
not always in a less degree than factory work, for
not only are the mother's time and attention taken
up by the work, but the air, light, and space of the
dwelling. Moreover, the mother probably toils

CAUSES OF INFANT MORTALITY 133

much longer hours for considerably smaller pay
than if she were under factory regulations, thus
injuring her health far more, and affecting that of
her children, born and unborn.

My attention was first drawn in London to the
disastrous effects of home industries upon child
life by the chance testimony of a professional
masseuse. I had asked her if she seriously
believed in the value of her work as a whole,
and she replied frankly, " I think it is mainly
humbug, and that is why I am giving it up for
general nursing. I once had a case which they
called infantile paralysis, and the treatment cured
it, but I don't think massage had much to do with
the result. The mother was a respectable and
well-meaning woman, but a voluntary wage-earner,
and the chUd was of rather a passive, sluggish
disposition. She called it "good," and was only
too glad to let it lie still, sleeping or waking.
When it was nearly three, the father suddenly
woke up to the fact that it ought to be running to
meet him at that age, and sent for a doctor, who
sent for me. I went through the form of massage,
and in six weeks the child could walk ; but I
honestly believe that all the good I did was done
simply by playing with it and exciting it, as the
mother ought to have been doing from the time it
was a few months old."

134 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

The mere fact that the home worker generally
requires all the light that there is, and drives the
children from the position by the window that they
would naturally choose, reacts unfavourably on
their health. I remember inducing one mother to
allow her invalid child to take possession of the
sunny bow window of the little front parlour
instead of keeping her in the kitchen, and far away
from its four small panes of glass ; and as great an
improvement resulted in the child's health, and
spirits, and intelligence as if the first step had been
taken in pauperising the parents by paying for a
three months' visit to the seaside.

Neglect, resulting in paralysis or deformity, is
especially likely to occur either with only children
or in the exclusively boy families of which one
comes across so many. If there is any girl avail-
able, old enough to carry or in any way convey a
baby from one spot to another, the child victim to
home industries is most likely to succumb to
bronchitis or pneumonia, owing to its being sent
out of doors in unfit weather and at unsuitable
hours and kept out for an unreasonable time.

If obstinate enough to survive this treatment,
the infant is sent regularly to school at three, or
even less, to run the gauntlet of measles, scarlatina,
diphtheria^ etc., although it is notorious that an
enormously large proportion of fatal cases occur

CAUSES OF INFANT MORTALITY 135

between the ages of three and five, and that if a
child can be completely protected until the begin-
ning of his sixth year, he is far less likely to suflFer
seriously from these diseases if he should unfor-
tunately contract them.

In all classes of home industries, and at all ages,
the children suffer from the moral and physical
neglect inevitably caused by the fact that they
have ceased to be their mother's first and most
important consideration. Some months ago I was
quite at a loss to account for the ragged, dirty,
stunted, and half-starved appearance of five little
boys ranging in age from four to thirteen. I knew
that the father's wages were only a guinea a week,
and the house rent was four shillings, but the
poverty was not marked enough to account for the
rags and dirt. At last I learned that the mother's
whole time, Saturday afternoons and Sundays
excepted, was spent in scouring the floors of a
neighbouring institution,' for which work she
received eleven shillings a week and perquisites.
If money alone would have provided what the
children needed, they would have been better off
than four-fifths of their sturdy, well-cared -for little
schoolfellows.

In almost every case where I have observed
children decidedly below the average of their street
or village I have discovered either that the mother

136 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

was a wage-earner, an excessive drinker, or feeble
in mind, two or more of these conditions often
co-existing. The married woman working for
money is extremely likely to injure her health,
and the overstrained, sickly, unnerved woman is
specially open to the temptation of alcohol, while
the power to retort, " Well, if I spent it, I earned
it," removes yet another protecting barrier.

General statements are often misleading, but
when one comes to examine concrete cases it is
obvious that it is practically impossible for the
chUdren not to deteriorate if their mothers are
engaged in any form of paid industry ; and if a
heflthy public opinion kept young married women
from such employment, widows and spinsters work-
ing for subsistence, and middle-aged and elderly
women working to provide for old age, would all .
be able to obtain a reasonable rate of remuneration.
No amount of money that the ordinary housewife
can earn equals the moral and physical advantage
of the concentration of her entire thought and
attention upon her own family. Workmen have
sometimes told me, using the expression seriously
and in no cynical sense, " A woman's business is to
spend her husband's money for him."

Men are not, and cannot become, economists on
a small scale. If women do a man's work, men
too often fall into the way of doing a woman's,

CAUSES OF INFANT MORTALITY 137

and each does it badly. Public attention is
frequently drawn to the totally idle and vicious
husband of the industrious wife, but I have seen
many instances where he slips into the position
of a willing but untrained and remarkably costly
servant.

Viewed in the light of their practical results,
the establishment, and especially the artificial
encouragement, of home industries seem to me
little short of deliberate sin against family life.
Home industries are the destruction of the home,
the destruction of domestic thrift and industry,
and one of the most fruitful causes of infant
mortality, child neglect, and drunkenness of both
man and wife. At first glance they may seem to
be an improvement upon the factory labour of
married women, but in reality they constitute a
more insidious and widespread evil.

Bad housing causes incalculable loss of infant
and child life, perhaps almost as much as over-
crowding ; but as the two so frequently co-exist,
one cannot well distinguish between the injuries
caused by each. Overcrowding is more easily
dealt with by legislation than bad housing, as it
would often be needful to visit a house a dozen
tiM«, .t different seasons of the year before graap-
ing its full possibilities of injuring health, especially
the health of children too young to attend school

138 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

or to be much out of doors. As far as my experi-
ence goes, the surface drains of yards are almost
totally neglected, and the condition of the roofs —
a matter the importance of which increases in
direct proportion with the smallness and lowness
of the house — is never sufficiently considered.
In towns most roofs are water-tight, but they
utterly fail in their duty as slow conductors of
heat, and even in ordinary years the temperature
of the tiny bedrooms may easily range from 30"* F.
to 90° F., which is a cruel strain even on adult life,
and one impossible for many children to bear up
against. The fact that houses are our outer cloth-
ing, and must be designed chiefly with a view to
the economical regulation of the temperature, seems
to escape attention. In most of the match-box
cottages recently designed the unlucky owners
have to spend three times as much on coal as they
would do if walls and roof were thicker, while in
the summer women will even drink tea cold rather
than light a fire until late in the evening. Only
last summer a little child lost her life while trying
to boil a kettle in the garden, and I found that
this dangerous plan had become a general custom
in the neighbourhood. " We're baked even with-
out no fire," protested the women when I remon-
strated.

Incalculable but undoubted loss of infant life

CAUSES OF INFANT MORTALITY 139

is caused by what is called " the modern fluidity
of labour." The domestic result of this fluidity
is that young women are separated from the
mother on whom, in case of illness, they are
often as touchingly dependent as in the earliest
days of their lives, and have to meet their time
of trial in towns where they have no relatives
and probably no friends, and nothing to rely
upon but the uncovenanted mercies of their
landlady. The only set-ofi* against this is the
cheapness of railway fares, and the increasing
unselfishness of the husbands of the older genera-
tion. Men of sixty or more will often " do for
theiri^elves " for a month or six weeks while the
wife goes to the help of the daughter and grand-
children. How different are the relations between
the mother-in-law and son-in-law of daily life
from those of fiction and the police-court ! How
little fact there is in fiction, and how much fiction
in police news facts ! " Can she come ? " asks
the young husband when the wife hastily tears
open the thin envelope with the pale ink and
the higgledy-piggledy writing, and a weight falls
from his heart when he learns that she is coming
by the cheap train that arrives at two in the
morning, and that he has nothing to do but
walk three miles to meet her and carry home
her bundles. If I am in the bedroom with a

I40 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

young mother, I never need ask who is in the
kitchen — I can tell by the very way her head
lies on the pillows.

But when all allowances have been made for
the complications of child-rearing, and for circum-
stances over which the women of the working
classes cannot be said to have much control, the
fact remains that a very considerable number
of mothers lose healthy and promising children
owing either to their own apathy, fatalism,
culpable ignorance, credulity, or sheer laziness.
Many of the children who figure in statistics
as having died of bronchitis or pneumonia con-
tracted the disease from no deeper or more
mysterious cause than having a soaked bib left
hour after hour on their shrinking little chests.
The only remedies to be suggested are better
general education and more detailed moral train-
ing, especially the inculcation of a sense of
responsibility ; encouragement of family feeling ;
an improved public opinion, which would make
parents infinitely more ashamed to own that they
had lost their children than that none had been
given them ; and increased efforts, in all directions
and among all classes, to teach women and girls
above the age of fourteen or fifteen the care
needed by infants and young chUdren. This is
considered an age of instruction^ but it seems

CAUSES OF INFANT MORTALITY 141

to me that we are losing very much by the fact
that all but professional teachers and grossly
ignorant persons appear to be afraid to open
their mouths, even after twenty years' practical
and tolerably successful acquaintance with a
subject, and are too much inclined to believe
that everyone in the present generation knows
all that pertains to their and their children's
bodily salvation, and that if they do not do what
they ought to do, it is because they have
knowingly rejected the ways of wisdom. Every
happy mother of children ought to be a teacher
to her acquaintances, whatever position in life
they may hold. Ignorance of maternal duties is
by no means confined to the poorest persons.
These are some scraps of the conversation between
two well-dressed women of the lower-middle class,
overheard in a railway carriage a few weeks since.
One had a child six months of age with her, to
whom she gave as much milk in one hour as it
ought to have had in eight, while the other
ceaselessly stuflFed an irritable, pasty-faced, knock-
kneed child of three. " She don't eat much as
a rule, but she's ate lovely all the way down
from London" (four hours' journey). "I've
lost three," cheerfully. " I've lost five," boastfully,
"and this one has been laid out twice for dead.
I'll tell you how I cured her. I always give it

142 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

to her if she's a bit run down. Live snails
crushed in their sheUs and squose through muslin
with brown sugar. My mother always says she
couldn't have saved me and my brother without
it. She lost nine. It's my sister-in-law Tm
going to now. She always thinks she can't get

on without me. She's lost " But here the

whistle shrieked, and we dashed into a tunnel.

I remember seeing a baby of five months old
fed on foreign grapes well powdered with saw-
dust, which it swallowed, skin, stone, and all after
a vigorous but ineffectual scrunch with its tooth-
less gums, followed by drinks of a liquid which
was certainly gin and water, but which, judging
from the small effect it had when drunk more
liberally still by children of three, five, seven,
and eight, must have been very weak — unless
the whole party were hardened topers. What
could one say that was likely to make any
impression? There were the five children, good-
looking, good-humoured, and entirely free from
any serious blemish. The "facts" related as to
the feeding of infants may often be true without
being in the least characteristic of their ordinary
treatment. In a house where there were twelve
living children, I was told boastfully by number 4,
"On Sundays we all have sausage for our break-
fast, even to the baby." I do not doubt it,

CAUSES OF INFANT MORTALITY 143

but I also know that on cold winter mornings
the five children of school age always had hot
bread and milk for their breakfast, that they
were never allowed to drink tea more than once
a day, and that they were forbidden, under
penalty, to eat unripe apples or to drink unboiled
water, and even in the summer holidays they
were never permitted to put on a damp or an
unmended garment. Nature is to a great extent
an easy-going ruler : if half of her laws are kept,
half may with impunity be broken — and she
is not even exacting as to which half is accepted
or rejected.

VI

The Working-Class Father

Is the working-class father as black as he is
painted ? I grant that to the economist he often
cuts a sorry figure. His excessive indulgence of
young children, his blindness to their higher
interests, the low value he places upon general
education, his lack of foresight and determination,
his limited power of controlling and directing, —
all these have an unfavourable effect upon the
community. But why is he always out of favour
with the philanthropical ? Is he less affectionate
than the father in the middle classes ? Is he less
self-sacrificing, less solicitous, less devoted ?

The prejudice against him is so strong that all
evidence in his favour is unread or misread. Two
years ago I wrote a book in which I described
the working-class father as he appears to me, and
was astounded to read in a review in a religious
newspaper: " One impression left . . . is how hard

it must be to attract the very rough and poor

144

THE WORKING-CLASS FATHER 145

by telling them of the Divine Fatherhood, when

the fathers they know are for the most part

drunken, brutal, and profane."

The more one knows of the working-class father

in private life the more one admires his patience

and good -humour. '*Does the baby cry much

at night?" I asked a man who had had about

twelve years' experience of matrimony. "No,

not a bit. He only wakes up once. He's a

wonderful good baby." I knew that this must

be more from good luck than good management,

and was disappointed of the moral I had hoped

to point as to the gain all round arising from

feeding children properly, and I said warningly,

" He is only saving up his strength a Httle until

he can do the thing properly." " That's it, mum,

that's it," he replied, with an appreciative grin.

He reflected for a few moments — the grievance,

if he thought of it as one, was evidently not on

the surface and ready to be poured out at the

first opportunity — and then added good-temperedly,

" He has his cross time early in the evening. I

gen'Uy have to trot him round for a nower or a

nowcr'n'half while my wife's gettin' the supper

and washin' up." How many middle-class men

would see any joke in such a reception after a

day's work which averaged over ten hours?

Working-men always seem to rejoice over the
10

146 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

birth of a child ; the welcome it receives may be
to some extent the mere reaction of thankfulness
for the mother's safety, but there is a genuine
personal feeling for it in addition. In an exceed-
ingly poor two-roomed dwelling that I visited
shortly after the arrival of the sixth child, I
found the father alone in the kitchen, where he
had been requested to stay in case he should be
wanted, while some of the family played in the
street and some were minded by a neighbour.
He had bought two sheets of green tissue paper,
and with solemn satisfaction was pinking them
out to adorn the mantelpiece, visible from the
bedroom when the door was opened. No " dinner
to the tenantry," no ox roasted whole, ever gave
stronger proof of fatherly pride.

From the time a baby is three days old the
father is accustomed to hold it in his arms, and
at six weeks it is his plaything directly he returns
from work. It soon aflFords unconscious discipline
in gentleness and self-control, for after speaking
loudly or impatiently to wife or neighbour, he finds
it useless to turn to it with tender cajolery; for
the little creature shrinks away terrified, and its
confidence must be won all over again.

I find one reason why children are short-Qoated
so soon is that their fathers wish to carry them
when they go out of doors, and no man but a

THE WORKING-CLASS FATHER 147

sailor has the courage to be seen with an infant
in long clothes. As soon as the child can make
the faintest pretence at walking, the father likes
to take it out unchaperoned by mother or sister ;
and if the wife feels any anxiety on these occasions,
it is for the baby's finery, and not its person. By
the time it comes to the second or third baby they
have learnt caution. "But to begin with," their
wives tell me, " they're all terrors for spoilin' the
children's clothes."

One day in early winter I saw a young fellow
of five or six and twenty allowing his two-year-old
son, dressed from head to foot in white plush,
to walk on muddy asphalt. Two more experienced
men were passing, and one hastily interposed, " Hi !
you hadn't ought to let the youngster walk on
that there pavement. He's sopping up the mud
all round." The father glanced at the child's
clothes and then replied airily, "His coat's too
long. It wants to get wore down a bit." The
*'old hands" simply gasped, and then exchanged
a shrug and a wink, followed by a roar of laughter
over the prospect of the scolding in store for him.

There are really no bounds as to what a mere
ordinary father will do — or do without — for the
sake of his young children. To spend his half-
holiday at the wash-tub, or to finish up his day's
work with the hardest part of the house cleaning,

148 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

is by no means unusual Most men draw the line
at using a needle and cotton, but I ^ave known
many expert with a sewing-machine.

Soldier fathers in the seclusion of the married
quarters (abodes of misery and squalid degradation,
some novelists tell us!) will even make clothes
for their girl children. It explains the look on
their faces when they take them for a walk. I
always thought it was something more than
fatherly pride, but have only known of late years
that the admixture was the joy of the artist.

A very real sacrifice, becoming more and more
common among working-men in the larger towns,
is that of sending wife and children into the
country every summer for a month or even six
weeks, and " doing for themselves " as economically
as they can during the somewhat dreary interval.
" My wife said I had kep' the house as clean as she
could ha' done it herself," one man told me, with
mischievous triumph, " but I didn't let on how I
managed. I usen't to wash up only once a day.
I gave^the kitchen a bit of a do out on Sat'days,^
but I never touched nothing else not till the
night before she came home. I began at six, and
I was at it tiU two in the morning. I didn't even
forget the door knobs."

For the present distress, and taking short
views of life, it often seems easier to deal with^

THE WORKING-CLASS FATHER 149

the temporarily repentant drunkard or idler than
with the superior father who has ideas of his own
on the subject of child-rearing, for they are apt to
be one-sided and extremely rigid. One may appeal
from Philip drunk to Philip sober, but the worthy
fanatic is inexorable, and is the one person with
whom I dread coming into contact. His ultimate
aims are generally the same as my own, or those
of any sane person, but nothing will convince him
of the superior efficacy in practice of "purpose
unwedded to plans." Not only does he know the
goal, but the only path by which it is to be
reached, often too stony a one for the feeble or
unwilling feet of wife and child.

For example, an exceedingly respectable man in

receipt of high wages was unshakeably convinced

that it was the duty of every mother to carry her

child until it could walk ; and as it was his duty to

. attend chapel on every possible occasion, his wife

received no assistance from him even on Sundays.

Although a vigorous, spirited, and industrious

-woman, she was not muscularly strong, the baby

'was exceptionally heavy, and, as sometimes

happens even with the healthiest children, could

not walk at all until he was two years old. The

husband absolutely declined to buy a perambulator

of any description, and if it had not been for an

elderly friend with a cast-iron back and the heart

ISO FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

of an angel, I do not know how the problem of
taking the child out of doors could ever have been
solved.

A generally good test of mental ability among
the poor may be found in the relative importance
of the position held by the claims of the future
and of the present ; but the superior father, in a
different way, often shows as little moderation as
the ne'er-do-well. In all his calculations the future
is allowed so entirely to overshadow the present
that I felt every sympathy with one little girl
who was driven to protest, when reproached for
enjoying the passing hour, " But this was a future
once ! "

^' Hope makes an excellent breakfast, but a poor
supper," said one of these over-anxious spirits to
a light-hearted friend. "But just think how
many of us die without finding it out ? " " You
wouldn't die if you smelt your supper a-cooking,"
retorted the other, with how much truth all per-
sons burdened with the payment of annuities can
tell!

I doubt if the average father is ever quite happy
after his children begin regular attendance at
school. Their daily absence is not the relief to
him that it is to their mother. If they dislike
going to school, he is convinced that they are
unkindly treated ; while if they enjoy the experi-

THE WORKING-CLASS FATHER 151

ence, he is more than a little bit jealous. Also,
they often meet the superior man's sons and
daughters, and then subtle and alienating changes
may take place in his playthings. They begin to
compare and judge, and their criticism is not always
silent.

Love of approbation is so strong, that with the
indirect influence of these better-bred children and
the direct influence of the teachers all working
towards refinement, it is not surprising that the
poorer and rougher pupils change greatly in
language and manner. Two or three years ago,
at a village school chiefly attended by agricultural
labourers' children, but with ten or twelve per cent.
t)f those who would formerly have been sent to
cheap boarding schools, a boy of eight was asked
to make a sentence about a bird. He promptly
complied with, " I seed a sparrer, an' I copped 'im
on the 'ead with a stone." The rest of the class
received this ingenuous composition with an ir-
repressible shout of laughter, and the unfortunate
author has been teased about it ever since.

And then another cause of alienation grows up :
the ordinary father has never thought of trying to
teach his playthings to obey him ; their " shan'ts "
and "won'ts" were a mere joke, to be overcome,
when necessary, by bribery and circumvention.
The mother would find domestic life intolerable

152 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

unless some obedience, however imperfect and
little to be relied on, were yielded to herself, and
she enforces this minimum from her children ; but
she does not allow her husband to discipline them
himself, and only too frequently she makes no
attempt to uphold his authority.

One day last spring two little rascals of four and
six, with ample space left for even the wildest
romps, were careftdly warned by their father not
to trample on some rows of peas which were just
coming up. Early next morning, before going to
work, he went to stick the peas, and discovered
that the rows had been considerably injured,
spoke sharply to the boys, threatening them each
with " a good smack " if any further mischief was
done. The mother was frightened, and interfered,
and during the day the children deliberately pulled
up peas and pea sticks, and raced up and down the
rows until the ground was trampled hard. All
the father said when he returned from work was :
'' Vm sick o' gardenin' ; I shan't do no more." But
he kept his word, and it meant a loss of at least
half a crown a week out of a very small income,
in addition to gains that cannot be measured in
money.

This mother was incredibly indulgent to her
two children. Eighteen months previously one of
them — I forget which — ^had been seriously ill for

THE WORKING-CLASS FATHER 153

about three weeks, and the only way they could get
him to take a sufficient amount of nourishment
was from a feeding-bottle. The other boy had
picked up the same habit, and they were still
drinking a pint and a half of milk a day in this
fashion, and the mother was sterilising the bottles
twice a day with as much zeal as if the sturdy little
villains were delicate babies in long clothes.

If home discipline were better, elementary
education would be far more effectual, for an
enormous amount of time would be saved to the
teachers, who often cannot do justice to the class
at large, and cannot allow reasonable freedom to
better-trained children, because of their incessant
struggles with young rebels who have never been
taught to obey, and whose parents will not even
yield a passive support to any efforts made to bring
them to their bearings. An elementary school-
master gave me a rather ludicrous description of
an encounter he had had with an irate parent.
He had caned a boy for persistent disobedience, and
directly he released his hold the boy ran home to
complain. Half an hour afterwards he reappeared,
accompanied by his mother in a towering rage.
'* I should like to know what you've bin knockin'
my boy about for ? " "Is that your son ? " ** Yes,
it is. I never lays not a finger on him meself,
and I won't let no one else do it, so I tells you

154 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

plain." " Please ask him to take his hat off." The
woman scowled, but turned to the lad and said
peremptorily, "Take your 'at off." No result.
"Take your ^at off!" she repeated angrily. The
class began to giggle, the woman made a furious
grab at the hat, and boxed her son's ears violently.

" Take that, you little ! " The children laughed

unrestrainedly, and she dragged the boy away,
vowing vengeance on him instead of on the school-
master.

When the boys are eight or nine the father
generally tries to establish his authority, and if
they are less ordinary than himself, if they are
either below or above the average in will and
intellect, he often fails to gain more than a partial
victory. It is too late in the day to subdue them
without an amount of severity that he probably
considers it unmanly to exercise, or a steady
pressure that he is morally " incapable of applying.
A boy suddenly asked to learn obedience can be
almost insanely obstinate. A mother of many
sons told me, and I have reason to believe that
her words were literally true and not merely a
picturesque arrangement of facts : " If their father
beats them till they lie senseless on the floor, as
soon as ever they come to they'll do whatever it
is they've set their minds on." At the same age
girls would be very easily brought under control,

THE WORKING-CLASS FATHER 155

but just because they are less aggressively and
wantonly disobedient to him, the ordinary father
postpones the struggle until they are twelve or
thirteen, and then it may be too late for them
also.

So long as the mother keeps the upper hand,
there may be no immediately bad results ; but if
other unfavourable circumstances arise at about
this period in the boys' lives, the unlucky father
will often be driven to declare that the children
are " beyond his control." To magistrates the plea
sounds absurd, and even contemptible : a boy, a
man, a stick— what more is needed ?

I knew one most distressing case where the
mother's health had broken down, and the father,
absent all day at his work, was utterly unable to
compel two boys of ten and eleven to attend school
regularly. After more than one warning, he was
sent to prison for seven days. His berth had been
kept for him, as he was steady and industrious, but
he returned to work a disgraced man in his own
eyes and the neighbours'.

For five or six years the ordinary father often
thinks it wisest to ignore. his son, but a renewed
sympathy generally arises between them when the
lad goes to work. This is not merely, " as dull
fools suppose," because the burden of supporting
the boy is now partly lifted from the parental

156 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

shoulders, but because they are getting on to the
same plane of difficulties and interests. Probably
the father has never known what it is to be " close
on fourteen, and not a thought in his mind but play
and school, school and play," but he understands
all the conditions of work ; and the lad on his part
realises as he has never done before his father's
daily toil and self-sacrifice.

VII

The Cost of Food

Very many fallacies with regard to the daily life
of the poor are accepted as truisms. It would be
easy to draw up a long list of these, but some
demand more active and detailed opposition than
others, because they are made the basis of innumer-
able charitable endeavours, and even of State
legislation.

One of the most widely spread and injurious is
the belief that the poor have to pay a higher price
for food than the middle classes. It is an entire
mistake, as I learnt from my own and other
people's domestic servants long before I had any
close acquaintance with working-class dwellings
and the expenditure of weekly wages.

In my country home, when I looked over my
first crop of carrots, I was surprised to find what
a large proportion were grotesquely misshapen and
inconveniently large, and made some remark about it
to a servant bom and bred near the " Elephant and

158 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

Cawsel." With her usual superabundance of
negatives, she exclaimed, " What, haven't you never
seen none of them before, miss ? Up our w^y they
come by the cart-load. They're just as good to
eat as the pretty-shaped ones, and four times as
cheap."

At a time when, in Sydenham, I was paying
three-halfpence a pound for potatoes, a young
housemaid told me : " We can get any amount of
new potatoes six pounds a penny. Of course
they're small, but the children don't mind the
bother of scraping them if only their mothers will
buy them."

On another occasion I complained that peas were
dear for the time of the year at Is. lOd. a peck,
and was told : " Mother" (living off the Old Kent
Road) " can buy very nice ones indeed for sixpence
a peck. They may be a bit harder than these, but
wonderful full in the pod ; and if you juss boils 'em
a little longer and with a bit of soda in the water,
they comes out as green and soft as can be."

I frequently inquired how much my servants'
relatives were paying for bread, and invariably
found that the price was a penny or three-halfpence
less on every gallon than I paid myself, and in
addition it was sold to them by weight, so that
they obtained ten pounds for every eight and a
half or nine delivered to me. I have heard careful

THE COST OF FOOD 159

housewives say that in a large family the " make-
weights " are sufficient to supply one child with
bread, or that they sometimes accept the difference
in plain currant cake, while women content to
have bread a day old can often buy it at a great
reduction.

On Saturdays meat can always be bought
cheaply by prudent people, and not only in
workmen's quarters. A butcher who served me
for many years was speaking one day of the ex-
travagant habits of the pauperised poor, and told
me : " Often of a Saturday night, when a poor
woman with a large family has brought me a
shilling meat ticket, I have offered to let her take
a whole shoulder of mutton, which would have
run to 3s. 4d. or 3s. 8d. if I had sold it in the
morning, because there was Sunday and practi-
cally Monday as well in front of me. Never once
have they taken it ; a scrap of rump steak or two
or three trimmed lamb chops is their fancy."

At a time when English mutton was tenpence or
elevenpence a pound, and the best New Zealand
sixpence halfpenny, an acquaintance of mine was
in the habit of supplying a former parlourmaid
and her pauperised husband with cooked
meat once a week, and told me : ^^ I have to
conceal the fact that it is foreign, for I am sure
they would not touch it if they knew."

i6o FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

Considering that this lady was honourably proud
of the fact that her own father had provided a
liberal education for five children, given a profes-
sion to two sons, and made a provision for his
only unmarried daughter, and had done all this on
an income that had never exceeded ten shillings
a day and his quarters, I was always unable to
understand her attitude with regard to a skilled
artisan who had only two small children and
was well able to earn an average wage of 36s.
a week.

The poor, especially in large towns, can even
obtain the luxuries and superfluities of life very
cheaply. One day I saw a country cottage heavily
laden with Gloire de Dijon roses. There were
literally hundreds, and I asked at what price the
owners would sell me some to send to an old friend
who had no garden. They demanded twopence
each for specimens that were quite overblown,
and declined to take less. Not long after a poor
London woman spent a week with my servant.
I was cutting flowers for her, and, handing her
some moss roses, said, " I suppose you do not see
many of these in Walworth ? " " No/' she replied
nonchalantly, " you can't never get them sort for
less'n four a penny, but the others is six a penny.
Pretty well all the year round I can keep two
vawses full for a penny a week."

THE COST OF FOOD i6i

With regard to groceries, the poor do indeed
pay at a higher rate, but whose fault is that ? Can
any grocer live by selling single candles and half-
ounces of tea at the same rate as he would thank-
fully sell by the pound ? Two of the foundation
stones of domestic economy are a larder and a
locked" store cupboard. No " model dwelling "
should be built without them, and no girl should
be worried to learn cross-stitch marking, or
stencilling, or shorthand until she has a clear idea
of the purposes served by these two conveniences
and has been inspired with the ambition to possess
them, whUe the most essential part of arithmetical
knowledge, as far as a working-class woman is
concerned, is the ability to keep accurate accounts
of receipts and expenditure.

I have always been convinced that the ordinary
calculations as to the amount of money necessary
to support a family in health and decency were on
too liberal a scale, as I have frequently worked in
houses where the earnings to my certain know-
ledge were decidedly below the " indispensable
minimum," and yet little or nothing was lacking,
and there were many superfluities. I have at last
seen a pamphlet drawn up by a woman doctor,
with the necessary mixture of science and practical
knowledge, and it clearly proves that even in a

large town a man, his wife, and four children can
II

162 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

maintaii] independence and live under healthy
conditions on a pound a week. No one can deny
that there must be much hardness and austerity
in the life led by such persons, or that one could
regard their condition as satisfactory if it were
stationary or self-perpetuating ; but as long as
they are entirely self-supporting they are on the
upward grade, while State or charitable assistance
cannot fail to thrust them into a lower and less
desirable position.

In estimating the amount of money required
by the poor for food, yet another and much
neglected factor has to be taken into consideration :
more food is needed to support mental strain and
less to support physical labour than is commonly
supposed. It is also open to question whether
the poor as a whole may not have developed a
more economical digestive system. I remember
hearing a naval officer say, "I could eat a blue-
jacket's breakfast and eat my own an hour after,"
and he was by no means a remarkable trencher-
man.

In the homes of persons mainly occupied in
hard work, but far above the poverty line, it is
simply amazing to any person accustomed to the
appetites of public schoolboys and young pro-
fessional men to see the slender meals prepared
for husband and sons, and to note the long hours

THE COST OF FOOD 163

that they will voluntarily remain without food.
Among working farmers and their families I
have observed peculiarly small appetites. Only
a few weeks ago a country girl of nineteeUi, who
had never had a day's illness in her life, explained
to me : "If you have cook [hot food] for dinner,
you don't want no tea, but if my brother is out
all day he looks for cook in the evening."

The ability to digest coarser food, once un-
doubtedly possessed by the working classes, is
rapidly disappearing as less claim is made on
their muscles and more on their brain power, and
many of the complaints of the housewife's
** increasing ignorance of cooking" arise from
the rapidly increasing fastidiousness of husband
and child. Last winter an elderly village matron
took a few handfuls of the sharps she had bought
to fatten her pig, and mixed and baked a neat
little loaf for her young daughter, "just to show
she what us were brought up on." The girl,
though by no mean exceptionally dainty, was
totally unable to eat it, and it was finally restored
to the defrauded pig. "Nor pigs won't be
content neither with what they did use to have,"
declared her mother ; but this must be attributed
rather to habit than to any fresh strain made
on their mental powers.

In the same village I find that the children.

1

1 64 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

though unable to resist the sourest of cider apples,
never trouble to pick the blackberries with which
the hedges are laden for several weeks. This in-
difference is not yet general, for I have recently
been in a neighbourhood where the mothers
dreaded the blackberry season almost as much as
the winter holidays, and where the children could
only be got clean to school, or with any appetite
to dinner, by many threats of the stick and more
punctually fulfilled promises of "a big pie a-
Sunday" if they would refrain from picking any
until the great business of the day was over.

It is the fashion to disparage the cooking of
the poor, and we are such slaves to our own
easy credulity that it is almost a shock to realise
that all the cooking in the world is done by them.
When do the rich cook? And nearly every
woman of moderate means who tells you with
a sigh of soft self-pity, " I have to do the whole
of the cooking myself," would be speaking more
accurately if she said, " I partly prepare some of
the food to be cooked"— a very different matter
from that hand-to-hand battle with the elements
which has to be engaged in before even the
simplest dinner is ready to put on the table.

Since all the cooking is done by the poor, and
most of the practical knowledge with regard to
it is exclusively their possession, why do they not

THE COST OF FOOD 165

cook oftener and better for themselves and one
another? If one carries the inquiry far enough,
the conclusion is arrived at that it is because they
do not know that food is necessary. If th^y
knew this with an effectual faith, all the inter-
mediate reasons and excuses for not cooking would
be swept away.

Thirty years ago, and even later than that, I
knew many elderly members of the professional
classes who seemed to regard eating as a bad habit
peculiarly strong in youth and gradually weakened
and brought under control as one grew older
and wiser. They sometimes spoke of a ** growing
boy's " need for plenty of food as if they faintly
understood that it was not altogether villainy on
his part ; but as it was considered equally natural
for a growing girl to eat very little, they cannot
have had any clear idea why the boy ate this
large amount or what service it performed for him.

A considerable majority of the working classes
at the present day are at about the same stage of
physiological knowledge. They eat because they
are hungry, and hunger is painful; and they
supply their children with food for the same
excellent if insuflScient reasons. Gluttony is rare
among the poor ; eating for the mere pleasure of
eating is almost an unheard-of thing except among
the young, and it certainly is not encouraged in

1 66 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

them. Daintiness is a vice, and the woman who
panders to it, especially in the case of husband and
sons, is not considered to have " done her duty by
them" as the moral leader of the household. If
the poor are not hungry, they see no good reason
for eating — why compel yourself to eat when
disinclined ? why tempt appetite, considering that
food costs money, and money is 'scarce and the
claims on it numerous and indefinite? All
mistresses who have employed servants brought
up in poor and would-be frugal homes tell the
same tale : " I can't get them to sit down properly
to their meals. Often at eleven o'clock in the
morning I find they have had no breakfast, they
' didn't feel to want none.' And of course it leads
to anaemia."

The idea that if people are well enough to
work a regular amount of food must be taken
never seems to enter their heads. Women in their
own homes, and for reasons other than poverty,
commonly go without food for six or seven hours
at a stretch, and, aided by a cup of tea, they will
frequently work half as long again without pausing
for a meal. To a limited extent, they recognise
that severe muscular exertion demands fairly
regular supplies of solid food, but they have no
more conception that brain work is exhausting
than they have that the dressmaker's apprentice

\

THE COST OF FOOD 167

and the school teacher need more baths than the
charwoman and the blacksmith.

The popular belief is that the sole reason why
the poor do not cook is that they do not know
how. This idea of the general ignorance of the
culinary art is grossly exaggerated, and there are
several reasons and many excuses for not cooking
besides housewifely incapacity. In the first place,
do the many critics of the working-man's wife
realise how much time cooking takes, more par-
ticularly when of an economical nature ? And do
they for a moment grasp the multifariousness of
her occupations even when, which is by no means
always the case, she is not a wage-earner herself ?
Granting the state of her mental development and
aU her surroundings, is it surprising that instead
of thinking one or two of these occupations of
more consequence than the frequent and regular
preparation of food, she is firmly convinced that
nearly the whole of them should take precedence
of that duty ?

Let us take an average, not an extreme case :
a woman in moderately good health, and whose
husband is earning about a guinea a week in the
country or thirty shillings in the town. She has
to do the entire house work of four rooms, all over-
crowded with furniture, and one of these, being
also a passage, has to be laboriously cleaned every

1

1 68 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

day ; and work of all kinds has to be done with
the minimum of labour-saving appliances and with
a sparing use of soap ; she has to make and mend
for four children, and to do a considerable amount
of sewing for herself and her husband ; she has to
wash, mangle, starch, and iron for the same number
of people. To give a faint idea of the amount of
washing done : among the respectable poor, very
few girls of school age have less than four white
pinafores every week; those under eight almost
invariably have a clean one every day, and it
is by no means unusual to have two. Washing
overalls and blouses are commonly worn by little
boys, and the number of collars and handkerchiefs
provided for them is constantly on the increase.
It must also be remembered that even if a woman
has girls of thirteen and fourteen at home, she has
no help from them in work of this kind. If the
neighbours say, "She lets her children stand at
the wash-tub,'' you may be certain that you have
come across a low type of mother. The accusation
is regarded as so disgraceful a one that it is never
made lightly. Fifteen is considered fully early for
their initiation ; husbands often do the roughest
part of the washing to spare their wives, but help
is not accepted from the children, much less
demanded.

To return to o\ir housewife ; she has twp children

THE COST OF FOOD 169

to get ready for school every day, and one (a far
worse piece of work) who must be induced to get
himself ready ; and the fourth, aninfant under three,
depends entirely on her care during at least seven
of her busiest hours. She cannot go out to do her
shopping without taking him with her ; probably
she cannot leave him for ten minutes in one room
while she is sweeping another. I know a boy of
two years old obliged to walk nearly four miles
every wage-day because his mother is too weak to
carry him, his sisters are too young to take care of
him even if they were kept at home to do so, and
the money for a perambulator has never been saved
because up to the time of his birth the family had
lived near a shop. In many parts of the country
the woman will have to do most of the white-
washing and papering, work that needs doing three
times as often in small rooms as it does in large
ones, and there may be animals to be tended and a
flower garden to be looked after. In addition to
all this, one at least of the children wiU probably
be ill enough during the course of the year to need
constant attention for a fortnight, and the others will
have sufficient ailments to " upset the house " on
many different occasions. Moreover, some neigh-
bour is certain to be in need of a great deal of help,
and there will almost inevitably be claims on her
from elderly members of her own or her husband's

I70 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

family. Finally, — and this is especially the case in
towns, — the husband may be fond of taking her and
the children out with him, and not only on Bank
Holidays but on any fine Saturday and Sunday
they must all be ready to make a public appearance.
This is far from being a grievance, but it means an
amount of planning and contriving of which the
old-fashioned working-man's wife knew very little ;
if one or two of the younger children were well
enough dressed to go out with their father, it was
all that was expected of her.

Is it any wonder that such a woman — and many
are struggling under far worse difficulties — cooks
as little as she can instead of as much ?

When the children are older, the very same
woman may devote a large part of her time to cook-
ing. I knew one who happened to have seven chil-
dren in rather rapid succession, and while they were
small very little cooking was done except when the
father was at home to bear part of the domestic
burden, and later on dinner was often cooked by the
eldest boy under his mother s directions. At the
present moment she has three sons at work besides
her husband; they are all employed in different
places, and except on two days in the week, " meals
is going on pretty well all the time," but there are
now two girls old enough to relieve her of part of
the house work, the boys have been trained to do a

THE COST OF FOOD 171

fair share, and she is justly proud of her manage-
ment. I once suggested to her that a plate of meat
and vegetables and gravy could be kept hot over a
saucepan of boiling water, and she crushed me by
saying, "My children wouldn't eat it done that
way ; the gravy dries up. I heat the gravy in a
little saucepan, and pour it on boiling at the last
minute."

The extreme irregularity of many working-men's
hours, especially the superior ones sent here and
there on their employer's business, is /another
reason why wives who may know how to cook
economically, and who have all the means of doing
the work, nevertheless resort to the frying-pan and
the " bit o' steak " in despair.

" How do you manage ? " I asked the excep-
tionally intelligent and well-educated wife of an
artisan, when she told me that sometimes her
husband would be at home at five o'clock or even
earlier, and then for three or four weeks would vary
from that time to one o'clock in the morning, when
he might arrive on foot from some distant suburb,
having missed the last train. " It's almost past
managing," she replied. " Sometimes I get a good
dinner that will keep an hour or two without hurt-
ing much, and then I find he's had it somewhere
else, or that he's too tired to eat it. He doesn't like
soup or stews, and he doesn't like cold meat, not

172 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

even with a salad and a nice cup of coffee ; and one
can't have pies for ever. When I was in service
my master used to send a wire if he was hindered,
and say what he meant to do ; but we can't well
afford that, so we just have to do the best we can."

The labourer's wife who knows that her husband
will hardly vary ten minutes in the time of his
arrival, and that he will be perfectly content with
hot potatoes and gravy and cold bacon and tea six
days out of seven, is often far less to be pitied than
the skilled artisan's wife who has to ask herself,
** Will he eat it ? " three times as often as she puts
the query, " Can I afford to buy it for him ? "

The dearness of fuel is another reason why little
cooking is done. In the north of England, where
coal is cheap, hot meals are far more frequently
prepared than in the south, where it is usually at
least double the price and there is less money
available for the purchase. It might be argued
that more hot food is eaten because the climate
makes it indispensable, but the west of England
has the advantage of cheaper coal than the east,
and has also a much higher average temperature ;
moreover, no one acquainted with the poorest houses
in both districts can deny that the art of cooking is
much more generally practised among cottagers in
the western counties than in the eastern.

The badness of the stoves supplied in working-

THE COST OF FOOD 173

class dwellings aggravates the difl&culty with regard
to fuel. In the country there is often nothing but
an extravagant open stove with an oven so small
that it suggests that it was simply made for the
chief purpose to which' it is put^stewing tea. I
have known a mother (formerly "a good plain
cook" and a most capable person) obliged to boil
the food all together in one huge pot hung over
the flames. In another house, where the mother
was a skilled cook and absolutely devoted to the
interests of her family, the eldest daughter told
me : " The children can have meat and vegetables
for dinner, or they can have pudding, but they
can't have both, because it isn't possible to cook
it." In towns the stoves are more promising in
appearance and less voracious, but they are
absurdly small for family use, and practically they
are often unmanageable, and drive the most pains-
taking of wives to despair. The same amount of
coal will one day heat the stove fiercely and
dangerously, and the next will not keep a single
saucepan boiling, while food placed in the oven
will turn sour before it is cooked. There is also a
general lack of cool larders and dry store cupboards,
and without these- economical catering is impossible,
however much care and trouble may be expended
on the details of housekeeping.

Superficially this defence of the working-man's

174 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

wife may appear like that of the celebrated
Roumanian peasant who was accused by a
neighbour of borrowing a bucket and breaking it,
and who solemnly averred, firstly, that she had
never had the bucket ; secondly, that it was broken
when it was lent to her ; and thirdly, that it was
absolutely flawless when she returned it: but
diflferent parts of the apology apply to different
persons, or to different periods of their life.

As we began by stating, the most deep -lying
cause why the ordinary woman cooks so little is
neither laziness nor specific ignorance of the art,
it is because she and her husband underestimate
the importance of food ; and it is quite possible that
many of her self-constituted advisers overestimate
it. In all attempts to instruct the poor or to
improve their condition directly, we must remember
that although they may not have studied " fluxions
or paradoxes, or such inflammatory branches of
learning," their interest in their own concerns is
naturally so much stronger and so much more
constant than ours that they may see their lives
more as a whole than we do, and that our spasmodic
efforts in this or that direction may upset the
balance which they are rightly, and with some
success, striving to maintain. Thrift, for example,
is an excellent thing, but the poor can tell you
much of its ugly and soul-destroying side, and

THE COST OF FOOD 175

they could bring forward equally serious draw-
backs to nearly all the virtues and duties urged on
them from above.

Old-fashioned schoolmasters strongly disapproved
of giving boys much to eat, and those who did not
gain or save a penny by the enforced abstemious-
ness of their pupils held as firm convictions on this
point as Messrs. Creakle ^nd Squeers. Old-fashioned
parents held much the same views. With many of
the facts that influenced these persons always
before them, can one be surprised when, in response
to the recommendation to spend less on mere
ornament and more on food, some of the best
mothers of the wage-earning class reply, " Children
don't want a great lot of eating. It only seems
to go to their heads and make them troublesome.
As soon as they go to work I feed 'em accordin'.
If you dress them nicely it keeps them in better
comp'ny instead of running the roads with a lot of
young roughs " ?

It is considered a point of filial duty for children
to prefer their mother's cooking to that of any
other person. The bitterest complaint I ever
heard from a mother was : " They think such a lot
of anything they get when they're out, even if it's
nothing but a jam tart." I remember a housemaid
rather noted for her fastidiousness, telling me with
gusto : " Our favourite dinner at home used to be a

176 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

penn'orth of rice with a ha'porth of sugar and a
ha'porth of milk stirred in." This was for six
children and their mother, but was probably
supplemented by bread.

All advocates of State feeding of school children
should remember how soon a privilege is taken as
a right. In a poor district wuere Christmas
presents had with some difficulty been collected
for the children attending a mission Sunday school,
one mother was so much displeased with the cheap
quality of the doll given to her little daughter that
she returned it the next day with a most insulting
message. How long would it be before such a
tender parent came raging to the Committee,
pouring out fiery complaints of the dinner that
they " had been and give " her cherished children ?

Knowing what human nature is, can one wonder
at the ease with which the poor may be pauperised ?
I remember reading an appeal to a benevolent
society designed to give temporary relief to
struggling members of the professional classes :
"His mother [an aged widow with a pension]
being now dead, applicant has no further means of
support." The applicant was a man of thirty, who
did not even pretend to be in bad health.

VIII

What is Charity?

What is meant by charity ? How should we define
it if we were guided solely by the deeds done in
its name? What conception do the children of the
present day form of its meaning? Unless the
private teaching that they receive acts as a
corrective, their ideas must be a confused jumble
of fancy fairs, theatricals, tableaux vivants, and the
delights of begging from door to door for subscrip-
tions or attacking and pertinaciously worrying all
passers-by. Not long since in a garrison town I
saw a showily dressed girl of twelve or thirteen
begging with equal boldness from men, women, and
boys. She seemed denuded of all natural modesty,
and I was relieved to see that she could blush even
from annoyance, as she did when an old lady,
aflfecting to believe that she was begging on her
own account, said coldly, " I never give money to
children in the street."

One day a child-collector came to my house and

12

178 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

asked for a subscription. I could not give her my
opinion without reflecting upon the discretion of
the parents who allowed her to undertake such an
office, but knowing that she was liberally suppUed
with pocket-money, which she spent in an entirely
wasteful and self-indulgent fashion, I said, "The
object is indeed a good one, and I am glad that
you feel interested in it To every threepence that
you will give out of your own allowance, I will
most willingly add a shilling. " I was never called
on to keep my promise.

The mothers of the present generation read
Ministering Children^ and learnt that personal
service, personal sacrifice, and modest self-efface-
ment were indispensable parts of charity. Their
grandmothers learnt the same in The Fairchild
Family^ and their great-grandmothers were taught
the lesson with equal clearness by Hannah More.
The child of to-day knows a shorter road, and is
openly encouraged to hope that its name, and even
its photograph, will appear in the newspapers
either as the youngest, or the first, or the most
successful collector — or at least as the child of its
father.

A considerably older girl implored me to work
for a bazaar " in which mother is taking so much
interest." If the mother had asked me herself, I
might have sacrificed my principles to spare her

WHAT IS CHARITY? 179

feelings, but I thought the girl would be able to
understand how the matter looked from a different
point of view, and told her some of the many
objections to raising money in such an indirect,
laborious, and costly fashion, and finished by offer-
ing her a sum far larger than any profit likely to
be obtained on the needlework she wished me to
supply. ** Mother won't think it at all the same,
and she is so much interested, you really might''
" By the way, you did not tell me the object of the
bazaar ? " " Oh— er— I don't know/' " Perhaps
your mother does ? " I suggested drily. " Fm
not sure. Mrs. Daveuham asked her to help, and
she's so much interested," and so on da capo.

In a certain small village where there was a
handsome schoolroom always at liberty for evening
concerts, lectures, etc., some busybody would not
be content without a Parish Hall, which was to be
" the centre of social union." She was an influen-
tial person, and the subscriptions soon amounted to
a sum amply sufficient to build a hall of the size
and style required for a village of some six or eight
hundred inhabitants, the usual proportion of whom
were infants under seven years of age content with
the parental doorstep. But the busybody could
not be satisfied with such an insignificant building.
Would not' critics say, *' Why have it at all ? It is
no better than the schoolroom " ?

i8o FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

When apparently complete, the building was over
£200 in debt. Then it was discovered that a hall
only a third part filled is a dreary and depressing
sight for the public entertainer, and a curtain was
bought at a cost of twelve pounds to divide it
across the middle, and a bazaar was held to raise
funds to stencil and otherwise decorate the walls.
A little later on there was a " unique opportunity "
of buying at a cost of a hundred guineas gates
" warranted to be worth £150," and it was hastily
seized.

Now for many years in that village the word
"charity" has been attenuated to the exclusive
meaning of paying off the debt on this hall, and it
is beitig done mainly by theatricals, which afford a
well-subsidised amusement to the richest and idlest
persons in the parish. On one occasion I remember
that the tickets for the entertainment were five
shillings each. ** There must be a large profit if
they all give their services for nothing," I said to
a lady of narrowly limited means, sighing over the
moral obligation of buying three of these tickets.
" Nominally they do," she replied, " but it means
that for six weeks or two months they spend as
much as they choose on cabs and telegrams and
telephones and postage, at the expense of the
charitable public. Out of this fifteen shillings,
how much do you imagine will go to pay off the

WHAT IS CHARITY? i8i

debt? On the last occasion the takings were
thirty-five pounds and the expenses a trifle under
thirty. At the same rate the hall would gain
considerably if I made a direct subscription of
half a crown. And fifteen shillings does not cover
my expense, for I must pay five more for a cab.
I could very well walk, but evening dress is de
rigueurj'

"In our parish," said a listener, "there was a
bazaar to furnish the newly built vicarage. It
was on a large scale, and two prominent members
of the congregation quarrelled bitterly some days
before it took place, because they could not agree
as to whether the profits should be spent at
Maple's or some newer place. The takings were
eighty-five pounds, and the profits nearly paid for
a very mean-looking arm-chair, but not quite.
My husband had to pay an extra eight shillings
or they would have had an even worse one."

Not long ago, at a school where the waste from
the boys' plates had always been given to a
charitable institution, an order was issued that
the refuse was to be sold. A loud outcry was
raised, and the fear expressed that the pupils
would thereby be taught mean, grasping ways,
instead of the charity and generosity becoming
their age and station. If it were the only alter-
native, I should prefer lads of "the late Juke

1 82 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

Judkins " type to those who had been trained to
believe that there was generosity in destroying food
and charity in giving away broken victuals.

The giving of coppers and threepenny pieces by
handsomely dressed people is as purely symbolical
a sacrifice as the Chinaman's burnt paper. The
only excuse is the impossible frequency with which
we are asked for subscriptions. If we once grasped
the elementary fact that a donation of a sovereign
to one institution means a larger net profit than
twenty separate shillings given to twenty distinct
charities, we should surely find strength of mind
to reduce the number of our gifts and correspond-
ingly increase their value.

" We are nearly out of debt," said the Treasurer
of a local charity ; " only ten pounds to the bad."
" What a pity that the debt is not completely
extinguished," I replied. "If people had only
known, they would gladly have made a further
effort." In his private and in his business life
he was one of the most strictly honourable men
I have ever met, but, " in the name of charity,"
this was his reply: "Oh no, no; I* am perfectly
satisfied. It is always a mistake for any institution
to be out of debt. The public would lose interest
in it at once."

Another man borrowed money at four per cent,
from leading members of the congregation in order

WHAT IS CHARITY? 183

to enlarge the church. When remonstrated with
by an outsider on the plain business ground that
it was an expensive method, he replied instantly,
" Oh, we don't calculate on paying the interest
more than once or twice. We didn't like to ask
them for the money outright, but they will soon
make us a present of it to save further trouble."
In his professional life this man, for honour's sake,
had recently sacrificed a large sum of money and a
position that it had taken him years of hard work
to attain, but he did not seem to have even the
haziest idea that it was possible for charity to
"behave herself unseemly."

The far-famed undergraduate who, being
questioned as to the nature of Good Works,
opined that " a few wouldn't do any harm," has
always been held up as a model of caution, but
at heart he must have been as rash as a Labour
Member or even an early Edwardian poor-law
guardian. Philanthropists, whether chronic or
acute cases, would do well to remember not only
that good works have demonstrably the nature of
sin, but that they are conamonly inspired by more
impulse and worked out with less thought, retro-
spect, and foresight than is the case with actions
of a specifically selfish or of a purely business
character.

Consider for a moment one of the most recent

1

1 84 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

of benevolent schemes : the establishment on a
large scale of charitable institutions for the medical
treatment, maintenance, and education of crippled
children. Some of its supporters have boldly
described this project as "getting at the root of
the evil," " fighting disease at its origin," and so
forth. Even metaphorically a child is usually
regarded as a flower, not a root ; and as a matter of
fact, a crippled child is mainly a result, not an origin.
If all the crippled children in the entire country
could be collected into institutions, and supposing
(however contrary to all previous experience, to all
knowledge of child-nature and child-needs and the
pitiably insufficient response of the most conscien-
tious officialdom to their many-sided claims) that the
patients are enormously benefited, should we have
done anything at all to change the conditions
under which those children were produced, or to
prevent another seven thousand candidat.es from
being ready for relief years before the original
seven thousand had been dealt with?

Work among the more ignorant classes of wage-
earners (not always the poorest) soon convinces
one that there are deep moral and mental causes
for all this physical suffering among their children.
Nothing but knowledge and care can prevent the
production of cripples, and the permanent crippling,
blinding, deafening, maiming, and distortion of

WHAT IS CHARITY? 185

children far more frequently arises from insufficient
mental development on the part of the mother
than from lack of means or lack of aflfection in
either parent. There is not only too little cut-and-
dried knowledge but an almost entire absence of
that imaginative foresight which leads more
educated parents to believe in and dread the
ultimate results of ailments, incapacities, and
injuries more than they dread fatigue and expense
to themselves or the temporary pain or incon-
venience of their children. " Look at that boy,"
I said to the daughter of a country surgeon ; "his
crutch is four inches too short for him. His spine
will certainly be injured. And I saw a boy yester-
day in need of a temporary support for his ankle.
He will end as a hopelessly distorted cripple."
"My father's patience is worn out," she replied.
" Over and over again he has exerted his influence
to get proper appliances for village children, and
then they cry and protest they can get on better
without them, and the parents yield at once. And
then, in other cases, they look on the appliance as
a sort of charm, and insist on its being worn when
the child has grown so much that the pressure
comes in the wrong place and does serious harm."

The ignorance of the parents is often so great
that they entirely neglect small injuries, and if
later on they try to trace cause and effect, they

1 86 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

ascribe results to trivial occasions that were in no
sense causes. Benny, for example, has hip disease.
This is not regarded as a form of tuberculosis
fostered by bad air and unsuitable food and cloth-
ing ; it is " all along of his having fell down one
slippery day when he were about five year old,"
ignoring the fact that if a healthy child falls down,
he picks himself up, and that is the end of the
matter; while if a delicate child were kept ex-
tremely quiet for a few days after a little accident
of this nature, all danger of an abscess forming
would probably disappear. Tommy has meningitis
because " a rough boy, who was too big, and hadn't
ought to ha' bin with the infants, knocked him
over a form." There is no realisation of the simple
truth that the ordinary termination of such an
incident would have been that the pupil teacher
would have consoled and silenced Tommy by
slapping his aggressor, and that their respective
sisters would have threatened to tell their respective
mothers, and omitted to do so.

The anecdotic system of argument is never con-
vincing ; but, as a traveller, almost a resident, in
that large (and for the most part tolerably comfort-
able) area which the charitable public persists
in marking, " Very dangerous ; go as fast as
you can ; nature of inhabitants inexplicable, no
light can be thrown by history or psychology;

WHAT IS CHARITY? 187

resort to experiment — the older and more fre-
quently discredited, the newer and more hopeful,"
one is obliged to bring forward personal experience
of that district in order to obtain a hearing and to
furnish a common language in which to argue our
common humanity. The professional philanthro-
pist is the worst of cynics, because a class-cynic.
The virtues by which the world is to be saved
cannot be found below a certain social, or at least
monetary, level. On wages of less than three
pounds a week men and women cannot possibly
help themselves or do anything for the benefit of
their children, while the entire scheme of the
universe can readily be altered by the spare
guineas and during the spare moments of those
with a larger income and immeasurably less interest
in the persons concerned.

Some years ago a father and mother, kept above
the lowest poverty line by industry and prudence,
had a little daughter born with a disease which
was known to be incurable, and which caused not
only the deprivation of many of the natural joys
of child life but pain which even the most skilled
treatment could barely alleviate. A small but
militant minority would thus give their judgment
on the case : " Life is a curse to the child. Let
us relieve her from the intolerable burden laid
upon her innocent shoulders." Less extreme rebels

1 88 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

against the conditions on which life and health are
passed on to successive generations proclaim hastily :
" Let us put her into a Home. If her parents feel
for her, it is a useless torture for them ; if they
do not, their indiflFerence must add still more to her
suflFerings." Logicians tell us that " all error Ues
in generals," but in popular arguments it is to be
found at least equally in wild indulgence in the
fallacy of the excluded middle. Had the parents
been left in ignorance of the cause of the child's
marred existence, it is difficult to say what might
have happened ; but a suspicion arose in the father's
mind that he himself was to blame. He asked a
medical man a plain question, and received an
unusually plain answer, and from that moment it
was the inward determination and ceaseless eflFort
of his life to make atonement by providing every
alleviation within his power. He not only worked
hard and spent freely, but he forced his unac-
customed brain to study ; and because of the
concentration of his thoughts and the intensity
of his desire, he ultimately succeeded in bringing
more relief to the child than the most advanced
specialists would have thought probable. When
asked any questions as to his family, he replied,
with the outspokenness of his class, " Our first and
only one. I could not bear to see another child
go through it." Directly and indirectly many

I

WHAT IS CHARITY? 189

hundreds of uneducated men and women have
learnt that child's history : can it be said that
she has suflFered in vain?

A certain amount of hardness, if accompanied
by foresight and an intellectual appreciation of the
case, is sometimes less difficult to deal with than
the strongest maternal affection minus these less
attractive qualities. A boy and a girl belonging
to different families received somewhat similar
injuries to their right hands. The girl's mother
was passionately devoted to all her children, and
in her care for their moral and religious training
was far above the ordinary standard, but because
the child's hand "if let alone " caused no pain, it was
almost impossible to persuade her that it was her
duty to allow surgical treatment ; and if the little
patient had not chanced to have an affection for
the nurse sent to dress the wound, and a consequent
willingness to endure the necessary discomfort,
permanent crippling must have resulted. The
boy's mother was decidedly below the average in
maternal tenderness, but she very quickly grasped
that unless the full powers of the hand could be
preserved he would never be able to follow his
father's trade, a fairly profitable one, and she
needed no further stimulus. When at last the
hand was pronounced to be completely cured, we
calculated that she had dressed it twelve hundred

I90 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

times. In the same town a brusque, active, stirring
mother of six sons and two daughters was told
that her youngest boy suflFered from a disease
which would make him a hopeless cripple. Her
grief took the inmiediate form of anger; she
slapped and scolded all her children with more
vehemence than before, and it is to be feared that
not even the invalid was exempt. There was no
compensating tenderness in the father, and alto-
gether it seemed a home the destruction of which
one could have borne with a certain amount of
equanimity. Nevertheless, she had the child's
interests at heart. She studied the matter, and
adopted a common-sense treatment which had just
begun to recommend itself to a few leading medical
men. Some months ago I received a message from
her to remind me that the lad was nearly eighteen,
and to assure me that he had grown " as strong as
his brothers" — no mean standard. One more
example of what can be done by direct teaching :
A child, owing to gross neglect, was in imminent
danger of losing the sight of both eyes. The
doctor, called in by the mother when the twelfth
hour had almost sounded, saw scarcely a glimmer
of hope, but he was so much enraged by her apathy
and fatalism that he told her that if the child
became blind it would be entirely her own fault,
and ordered her to apply certain treatment every

WHAT IS CHARITY? 191

two hours night and day for an indefinite period.
Greatly alarmed by his vehement outburst, she
carried out his instructions to the letter, and with
perfect success. Six months later she was to be
seen pointing to the child's bright eyes as an
example of what could be done by constant care,
and to herself as a bom-and-bred exponent of
never-say-die principles ; but she was generally
frank enough to add that if her hearers would
begin escrlier they could do as much with two
applications a day as she had done with twelve.

Every one of these children — and they are fair
samples — ^were, or could easily have been made,
candidates for a National Cripples' Home.

"At least the children must not sufier" is a
favourite argument of those direly suspicious of
the value of all family life but that of their own
class. It has never been Nature's plan to exempt
children from sufiering, and although we may call
her methods clumsy, wasteful, and cruel, they are
at least workable and yield a balance of advantage.
If we tried to interpret dumb Nature's laws to
her more backward pupils, might it not be more
generally profitable than if the same amount of
energy were devoted to attempts to nullify these
laws ? At the beginning of this century we were
promised "a masculine age," but we have never
yet been more in need than we are now of the

192 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

warning: "To develop sympathy without de-
veloping foresight is just one of the one-sided
developments which fail to constitute a real
advance in morality."

In barest justice to the working classes it must
be owned that their treatment of crippled children,
as of all others, generally errs on the side of
excessive indulgence, but it is half unconsciously
based upon the wholly gratuitous assumption that
the former will die before reaching maturity.
When trying to establish rational diet and rational
treatment, one has not only to oppose the un-
reasoning tenderness of parents, but the affection
of bachelor uncles, childless aunts, elder sisters,
and even brothers, and the kindly obstructiveness
of neighbours who " can't abide to see a sick child
^rossfi d-^ What is needed is education of the
parents, so that the supply may be cut off at its
source, and education of the children without
removing them from the homes where they are at
once teachers and taught. Nowhere else will they
meet with the same love, or develop morally to
the same degree, nor even receive as practical a
preparation for the hampered, difficult life that
must always be theirs. They have been wronged,
but we must let them bear their wrongs openly
lest we should be lulled into a false security and
more widespread evils should ensue. "Out of

WHAT IS CHARITY? 193

sight, out of mind." While cripples exist, let
them be seen in our daily lives, and not herded
together like criminals in barracks, the very
existence of which would rapidly pass out of public
consciousness, and never be thought of again until
they reappeared in our daily substitute for thought
under the sensational heading of "Gigantic
Frauds," or "A Nation of Cripples."

The great mass of benevolent people seem to
have no dread of the indirect results of their
well-meant labours, while the minority have learnt
to fear these results so much that it is only with
an eflfort that they can maintain the belief that
they are not entirely and inevitably injurious, or
give admittance to the suggestion that if they are
so it must be because the work has been done on
wrong lines. If the results of philanthropic action
are mainly bad, it is not that men have erred in
striving enthusiastically for the supposed benefit
of humanity inst^ead of remaining either blandly or
querulously quiescent, but because they were start-
ing from wrong principles. Grenerally speaking,
their opinion of their fellow-creatures has been
too low, not too high. They talk about faith in
the possibilities of human nature and then act as
if they believed it capable of sinking to infinite
depths while incapable as a whole of reaching
anything like the level on which they flatter them-
13

194 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

selves they are standing. Despising our neighbour,
not only as he is — ^which might sometimes have
a shadow of excuse — but as he might be, is the
root of much of our legislation and many of our
vaunted and flaunted charities.

Sixteen years ago I was about to visit a small
but rather well-known town, and an old acquaint-
ance said to me, " You will find it such a splendidly
managed place. The principal landlord will not
tolerate a pawnbroker, and if he could prevent it, he
would not have a single public-house. As it is, they
are very strictly Umited." It sounded promising,
but although I had not fully and in detail realised
that no one can be made virtuous by Act of Par-
liament, I was haunted by the memory of a story
told me by my next-door neighbour. During
one of his many visits to America he was taking
a three days' railway journey and at luncheon
asked the negro waiter to bring him a bottle
of stout. He was absorbed in a newspaper, which
related more of his wife's family than he had
heard in twenty years, and more of his own than
he had known in fifty, and suddenly woke up to
the fact that a cofiee-pot was in front of him, and
pushed it irritably away : " We are in Maine, sah,"
explained the waiter. " If you miLSt bring me
coffee, is that the smallest reason for bringing it
to me stone-cold ? " The man smiled broadly, and

WHAT IS CHARITY? 195

checked all further complaint by pouring out the
coflfee with a fine head to it. With this in the
background of my thoughts I asked, " Have you
ever visited the houses in the poorer parts of the
town? What kind of a life do the women and
children lead ? " " No, I have never been there ;
but one does not need to do that in order to know
what a difference it must make in their lives, no
pawning and no drunkenness." The day before I
started, a woman I have never met since said, in
the pauses of punching in the background to a
piece of wood-carving, " You'll find it an awful
place. It is exceedingly difficult to get a licence
there, and of course that means a lot of dens
where drink is sold secretly; and to make up
for the risk and trouble, they sell nothing but
poisonously bad spirits instead of a great deal of
ordinary beer and a little moderately bad whisky
and gin. And then the dead set against pawn-
brokers. No doubt pawning is a miserably foolish
and extravagant system, but on ne dStruit quen
remplafant Nothing has taken the pawnbroker's
place, and so his agents come thirty or forty mUes
by train, tap at the doors, and ask the people if they
are sure they don't want to pawn something. Or
else three or four women join together to pay the
railway fare and expenses of a neighbour, generally
a widow with very little money and plenty of

196 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

unoccupied time. It ends in their paying about
fifty per cent instead of the seventeen to twenty-
four that it usually works out at/' "Have you
ever been there ? " " Never ; if one knows those
two facts, and also that wages are irregular and
nominally high, one can picture all the rest."

My first visit to the town was too brief for me
to arrive at any conclusion, but six years later I
learnt definitely that the broad lines drawn by
her trained imagination were only too true : the
sordid and ugly details readily slipped into place.
It seems incredible, but many of the oldest
inhabitants, persons whose names were to. he**
found on every subscription Ust and lent prestige
to every charitable committee, entirely agreed
with my first informant: these excellent regula-
tions existed, their eflFect must be good, and the
working-class wives and children as a whole
must be in a state to be envied by all the rest
of the world. I said to one of those who claimed
unstinted admiration for everything within a radius
of two miles, " I am acquainted with several poor
districts in London, and with garrison, seaport,
and cathedral towns, — and with some which have
the disadvantage of being all three, — but I have
never seen anything to compare with the drunken-
ness, wife-beating, and child-neglect that there is
here." " Should you say that there is any

WHAT IS CHARITY? 197

drunkenness here?" she asked, astonished at
my vehemence but unshaken in her opinion.
It has since occurred to me that most long-
established townspeople suffer from a kind of
moral presbyopia ; they are so exceedingly anxious
to reform other towns, especially great cities, and
so oblivious of their own weak points. A few
months ago a " prominent citizen " appealed from
the platform for funds for the N.S.P.C.C., funds
entirely to be spent in other places, because " of
course we have nothing of that kind going on

tere." His blindness must have been to a great
stent' wilful, for the Society's inspector told me :
" As soon as I could get a quiet word with him,
I said, ' Come with me, sir, and within a pistol-
shot I'll show you two of the worst cases I've
ever seen, and I've seen a good deal in the course
of my life. If you haven't had your dinner already,
you'll eat none to-day.' And he wouldn't go ! "

A little attention might most profitably be
diverted from the oldest districts of the largest
cities to small towns and rapidly growing neigh-
bourhoods. Not long since, in a town numbering
less than four thousand inhabitants, I found a
slum that could not easily have been equalled
in London or Manchester, and in a town whose
name I had never before heard I was told by
a newly appointed local authority that the over-

198 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

crowding was a scandal. In one house containing
four very small and low rooms lie had found
six adults and sixteen children, and it required
several visits and many threate of prosecution
before he could even discover which of the adults
was responsible for the three most neglected
of the chUdren.

Indirect results of a beneficial nature seem
sometimes almost fortuitous. In a town where
a large proportion of the wage-earners Uved so
far from their work that midday dinner was an
impossibility for them, I had noted the bad effect
that this had upon the meals of the women and
children and the slackness and idling over house
work partly caused by insufficient occupation and
partly by unnourishing food. What was to be
done? Neither time nor strength would permit
the men to take the double journey on foot ;
their wages although regular were small, and
the tram fares would have been twopence a day
for some and fourpence for others, and neither
hours nor routes suited the workers in question.
The general system of the trams, in fact, was
only adapted to men who came from a considerable
distance and saved the fares on their rent. There
was a small omnibus company in the town, slowly
but not silently fading away. Suddenly the
brilliant idea struck the proprietors that these

WHAT IS CHARITY? 199

old-fashioned vehicles could be used to suit the
convenience of the short-distance men, taking
them as nearly as possible from door to door at
a halfpenny a head. An enormous impulse to
domestic industry (in the right sense of the words)
has been given, and the mingled blessings resulting
from punctuality, hot food, regular family inter-
course, and "paying as you go," are widespread.
Needless to say, there are persons who would —
light-heartedly and with a good conscience— have
risked all the indirect results of subsidising the
trams at the general expense of the ratepayers,
or " taking them over " and trying to make them
do work for which they were unfitted. In the
country I have known five middle-aged and
elderly workmen, too stifi* for cycling, able to
undertake well-paid work six or seven miles from
their cottages owing to their co-operative ownership
of a horse and cart. I believe the horse was over
twelve when they bought him, but as he is
reasonably well fed and they are content to jog
along quietly, reading and smoking, he viU not,
as they express it, owe them very much by the
time he dies.

A curious instance of indirect results was
brought under my notice by a Frenchman well
acquainted with his eastern neighbours. " In our
army the men arQ oftea harassed aiid worried

200 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

and sometimes insulted^ but these id very little
personal violence compared with what you find
among the Germana" "How do you account
for it ? " " WeU," he replied drily, " if you ill-treat
a German soldier beyond the point he finds
endurable, he shoots himself. The Frenchman
would shoot someone else — ^to begin with, at
any rate."

The consequences of shorter hours of labour
are not entirely beneficent to wage-earners past
their first youth, not merely because many of
them do not know how to occupy their leisure
and are too set in their ways to learn, but
because of the difficult mental and physical
adaptation implied by turning from long hours
modified by dawdling to briefer but more strenuous
labour. I remember a large establishment where
the hours averaged about nine and a half all
through the year and were about to be reduced
to eight. "Look at that!" one of the officials
exclaimed to me. "If they think we can afibrd
that kind of thing out of an eight-hour day,
they're very much mistaken. They won't find
it all joy, I can tell them!" L looked : for
some purpose a small piece of quartering had
been needed ; oifie man held the wood in place
with his foot, one man leisurably sawed it through,
one man stood waiting to receive it when finished,

WHAT IS CHARITY? 201

and all three talked. Two or tiiree years lat^
I was told that all the elderly men continTied
to dislike the change, and that those who were
even approaching middle-age had found it a
great strain.

The indirect effects of regular-attendance medals
upon the statistics of measles, diphtheria, etc.,
might be well worth inquiring into. My advice
to every school nurse when searching for cases of
incipient illness is : next to the most neglected
children, give your closest attention to the best
dressed and most anxiously cared -for. The
neglected child will often go to school when
feeling wretchedly ill because it has nothing more
attractive to do ; the ambitious child of ambitious
parents will conceal symptoms of illness with the
most sedulous care if he has a medal in view;
while the average child of the average mother
would simply sit down and cry until given
permission to stay at home and sit by the fire.
: We all have our favourite charities, our favourite
hobbies, our favourite line on which to urge forward
meddlesome legislation. Surely it would be wise to
stop occasionally and ask ourselves, What are the
indirect results of — for example — soup kitchens,
free boots, public entertainments for cripples, recrea-
tion schools, and comfortable shelters for tramps ?

On the outskirts of a wealthy town I was shown

202 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

a row of cottages and told that nearly every year
they were flooded for several weeks. "And yet
there is not a single one vacant/' I remarked.
"They must be most unhealthy, but I suppose
the rent is temptingly low ? " " On the contrary,"
replied my informant, who had known the dis-
trict well for some forty years, " On the contrary,
rent is at a premium. You see, it is well known
that directly the floods are out a subscription list
will be opened *to cope with the exceptional
distress and lamentable destruction of property.'
When the few sticks of furniture have been hand-
somely replaced and the balance divided, the
tenants think it almost a point of honour to move
on *and give someone else a chance,' but if all
the assistance were given in money, they would
probably remain, and the same stage property
would be * washed away ' time after time. From
one point of view, the most serious part of the
matter is the number of persons who are simply
bribed and tempted to ruin their health by Uving
there. Some die, but others linger as fresh food
for the epicure in charities."

Not long since a woman doctor wrote to me :
'*My first dressership in the out-patient depart-
ment of a general hospital made me realise how
much we are doing towards undermining the
independence of the people who come to us,"

WHAT IS CHARITY? 203

At no point have benevolent people more
nearly succeeded in pauperising the poor than with
regard to medical attendance. Common humanity,
of course, dictates that such assistance should be
within the reach of all, and in the present state of
society it is reasonable that the very poorest
should receive it gratis, and persons with an income
from all sources of less than 25s. a week for
a very small fee if paid in the form of an insur-
ance. But is there the smallest excuse why the
families of men in receipt of thirty, forty, or more
shillings a week should expect to have medical
advice freely, or for a ludicrously inadequate sum ?

Last autumn a woman I knew very well wished
to consult a doctor. She had been married ten or
eleven years, but it was the first time she had
needed one. There were no children, the weekly
income was just under 30s., and was earned in a
neighbourhood cheap as far as all the necessaries
of life were concerned. The husband had never
had a day's illness since his childhood, and had
never been out of work since he was a lad of
eighteen. She did not care to employ local talent,
although there were two doctors of sufficient
reputation to be consulted in the gravest crises by
the wealthiest persons in a large provincial town,
and she went to her parents in London, the bare
travelling expenses being 26s. I do not know the

204 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

parents' exact income, bat they had no children
dependent on them, they were always well
dressed and looked thoroughly well fed, and they
paid 7s. 6d. rent for three large rooms, which
is considered a liberal allowance of space for two
elderly persons. On her return firom town a fort-
night later she told me that she had first seen the
doctor "just for a few minutes," and had then
gone to his house, accompanied by her mother,
and he had "thoroughly examined her." For
his opinion, which proved to be perfectly correct,
she paid the sum of sixpence, and she spoke to me
with the deepest and most self-righteous scorn of
people better oflf than herself "who won't never
pay nothing to a doctor, and if they give twopence,
expect to get the bottle o' med'cine in."

One unlooked-for result of so much free and
tenth-part-paid medical attendance is that poor
but independent persons have to pay at a very
high rate for all they receive. A few months ago
a woman of eighty, living with her husband of
about the same age in a four-roomed cottage at
half a crown a week, fell down the rickety, ladder-
like stairs and injured her shoulder. The doctor
visited her for less than a fortnight, and did not
come every day, and then sent in a bill for £5, Os. 6d.
She at once drew £5 from the savings bank, and
sent it to him with a message that if he wanted

WHAT IS CHARITY? 205

the sixpence he could come and fetch it himself.
The private income possessed by the old couple
was extremely small, and they both still worked
for a considerable part of their subsistence. In
another instance a middle-aged cottager had to pay
£2, 12s. 6d. for three visits and a little medicine.

I hear much of the noble generosity and dis-
interestedness of doctors, but it seems to me that
most of them receive as large incomes as any other
professional men. When, chiefly to save them-
selves trouble, or to gain experience or a reputation,
they attend the poor for nothing, they do not
abjure that portion of their gains — they simply
take it from the next person who can or will pay
them. It is a kind of Robin Hood morality, and
they are often more mistaken as to the means than
as to the good-will of their patients.

There can be no doubt that the out-patient
department of hospitals is seriously abused, and
the patients and their friends not seldom waste an
amount of time and money over their attendance
which would have been sufficient to pay for the
services of the fuUy qualified practitioner living
not 200 yards from their door. I knew an
artisan^s wife who week after week took her
young son to a hospital where she paid twopence
for a bottle of medicine. She had to spend ten-
pence on omnibus fares, and was often obliged to

2o6 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

wait four hoars for the minute-and-a-half interview
with the doctor. At the end of that time she
generally ^^felt that feiint" and was unable to
return home without refreshment, usuallj paying
sixpence for what she could have provided at home
for three-hal^nce. Simultaneously with these
twopenny bottles of medicine, and of course
unknown to the hospital authorities, the lad was
swallowing expensive quack remedies, one of which
cost 20s. and did him so much harm that for
some weeks the mother was afraid to try any
further experiments.

Nor is the multiplication of cottage hospitals
an unmixed blessing in rural districts. I have
received bitter complaints that doctors now com-
monly decline "to attend cottagers unless they are
literally unable to leave their beds. Medical and
surgical cases alike, and of nearly all degrees of
gravity, have to find their way as best they can to
the surgery possibly five miles or more from their
home. Every really zealous doctor would insist
on seeing patients in the environment in which
they have to be nursed, in order that his advice
may as far as possible meet all the circumstances
of the case. What is the use of treating a man
for consumption or rheumatism unless you go to
his house and find out all that he is doing to
aggravate the disease ?

WHAT IS CHARITY? 207

Club doctors are as a rule so overworked and
underpaid that **a halfpenny diogenes" (diagno-
sis) is becoming a standing joke among working-
men— a very grim one when viewed by its
frequent results. And yet many of the middle
classes, as ready as anyone else to be pauperised,
are longing to insure themselves in a somewhat
similar fashion. A short time ago I heard of a
man in receipt of an income of £600 asking the
best doctor in the place to enter into b/ contract to
attend on him, his wife, four sickly children, and
one servant for an inclusive fee of £5 per annum.
He was hurt and astonished when the offer met
with a civil refusal.
~ Needless to say, it is not only in the out-depart-
ments of hospitals that the pauperising tendency
is at work. In my opinion, no one but the father
or mother of a young family, and by no means
all of these, should be admitted entirely without
payment to any hospital ward, and especially no
child of a legally dependent age. I remember
observing a lively, healthy-looking little girl of
nine or ten in a London hospital, and asked
how long she had been there. To my utter
astonishment — for it was a case of an ordinary
nature and no great severity — I was told " Four-
teen months," and on further inquiry learnt that
she was one of a moderate-sized family, and her

2o8 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

father was in regular receipt of 35s. a week. Not
one farthing had been paid bj the parents towards
the child's maintenance, nor had they even been
asked to make a subscription. Very soon after, in
another hospital, I came across a boy of fourteen
who had been an in-patient for nine weeks owing
to an injury which had occurred the first day he
went to work. He was insured for 10s. a week (one
single penny, by the way, was all that the insurance
ofl&ce had received). This money the parents were
permitted to pocket, while the authorities were pub-
lishing most pathetic appeals for funds.

All children and dependents ought to be paid for
in strict proportion to the income of their natural
guardians, and the charge should never be less
than the bare cost of maintenance (exclusive of
rent) of a person in that class of life in their own
home ; even if it were but fifteen or eighteen pence
a week, I would exact it. Strict rules ought also
to be drawn up to meet the case of well-to-do
persons carried to hospitals after meeting with a
street accident. After remaining for days, and
even weeks, members of the wealthier classes — and
then only under moral pressure — ^will hand in a
cheqne which does not represent the tenth part
of what their expenses would have amounted to
if they had been conveyed immediately to their
own homes.

WHAT IS CHARITY? 209

With regard to the support of religious organisa-
tions, it cannot be said that the poor as a whole
have ever been independent. Members of small
and struggling sects often make genuine personal
sacrifices to support the form of worship that they
prefer, but the rich chapel pauperises as extensively
as the rich church ; the poor are carefully encouraged
in the belief that they are to receive everything
and give nothing, and soon establish an exacting
code of how much they may claim in return for
the smallest amount of complaisance or outward
conformity. "Ye — es," I heard a woman whining'
to a worried-looking deacon not any too well oflf
himself, " Ye — es, they've been and sent me some
grosheries and coal and a meat ticket, but none of
them don't think for to ast how my rent is runnin'
on," and she intimated clearly that she might be
reluctantly compelled to attend some more liberal
form of worship. But it was a man who succeeded
in reducing the practice of conformity to a minimum.
His wife attended chapel and he went nowhere,
but he was regarded with profitable approval in
certain quarters because he had announced that
" if he went anywhere, it would be to church."

Every church and chapel has practically similar

plans for battling " with the present distress," the

same inability to look ahead, the same lack of

moral courage and common-sense, and the same

14

2IO FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

essentially low and pessimistic views of human
nature ; but the associations that seem to me the
most injurious to thrift and foresight are those
which treat childbirth not only as an undeserved
but as a totally unexpected misfortune, which ought
to loosen the purse-strings even of the most prudent
as readily as the news of an earthquake or a
destructive cyclone. They are not as far advanced
as a poor woman of my acquaintance who remarked
drily, "Children doesn't walk in unbeknownst;
they always gives you nine months' notice."

Next to this, if not before it, one must deprecate
all charitable assistance given in their own homes
to permanently invalided married men. I have
known families of from three to eight children
bom after their fathers became unable to work.
These men were mainly supported in the name of
religion, and their oflfspring for the most part had
little joy in living and scanty prospect of ever
benefiting the community to the extent of a year's
steady work.

Another most injurious form of charity, when
carried out on a large scale, is the provision of
free clubs and recreation rooms. If these institu-
tions were taken advantage of only by the poorest
of the poor, there might be a large balance of
advantage, but these rarely make use of them, or
only for a short period immediately after their

WHAT IS CHARITY? 211

foundation. They are used to a considerable extent,
if not exclusively, by the most respectable people
in the parish, and substantially injure their home
life, and also help to render tolerable an insufficiency
of house room which ought not to be endured for
a moment, and which in many cases would not
long be borne if it were not for the mistaken
kindness of these alleviations.

I remember several times visiting an evening
class for boys instructed giratuitously by two ladies.
The subject was badly taught, the boys were under
no discipline whatever, and therefore did not
benefit even indirectly, and one had only to look
at their clothing and listen to their conversation
in order to realise that they were not neglected
wastrels but lads with decent homes and parents
capable of looking after them. Less -than a mile
away an old-established teacher of this very subject
was receiving charitable assistance because he and
his invalid wife were in actual want of food. I
cannof still further point the moral by saying that
he was a good teacher, but estimating the best
exponent of theS^^t I have ever seen at 100, I
should put him down at 50, and the two well-
meaning amateurs 4t about 1 for their knowledge
and 5 for their poiwer of imparting it. I have
never visited a recitation school, "but a lady who
had done so told me that two peoplej were engaged

7

212 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

to put away the toys when the children had
finished with them— thus depriving them of the
great lesson taught in every nursery.

Even compulsory education has among its draw-
backs the fact that the parents are relieved of
their children's presence for so many waking hours
that they voluntarily remain in quarters dispropor-
tioned to their real needs and their average income,
bitterly complaining of the holidays and sending
their children to school fully two years earlier
than it is desirable they should go, and often
making them attend when they are obviously
ailing and ought to remain at home.

We talk of the independence of the poor, but
what value do we really place on it? Is it, in
the cant of the day, considered a " national asset " ?
How many capable and charitable people can lay
their hand on their conscience and declare that they
are not flattered by helplessness ?

Above aU, what is meant by saying that children
are a " burden " to their parents and a " gain " to
the State? It seems suspiciously like the trivial
fallacy: "You can afford to lose a little on each
sale because of the enormous demand." If children
are worth nothing to their parents they are worth
nothing to anyone else, and the sooner the world
comes to an end the better.

The real attitude of the unpauperised poor

WHAT IS CHARITY? 213

towards their children was well expressed by a
woman who had lost hers by emigration and who
said, " I miss them, and I want them ; and I miss
them mair than I want them." It was for love's
sake that she mourned, not for money or service.
" Endow motherhood ! " Was ever a grosser
insult breathed? It is left for the charitable
and religious public to make suggestions that the
satirist would find too bitter and the libertine too
licentious.

Sympathy is a necessary quaUty for all who
would work among the poor, but it is sympathy
with their life as a whole that is required, and not
merely with its trials and misfortunes. All hyper-
sensitive persons may safely console themselves
with the belief that although they do not fully
realise the bitterness that lies in other people's lot,
they are often wholly ignorant of its consolations.
I had a patient blind, paralysed, depende&fr on
grudging service, irreligious, unintellectual, suffer-
ing from insomnia, and spending fully twenty out
of the twenty-four hours in unbroken solitude.
This man derived a simply incalculable amount of
satisfaction from the mental contemplation of his
own admirable leanness and other people's actual
or presumed obesity. Whenever I had persuaded
kind-hearted persons to spend an hour with him,
his one invariable comment had reference to their

214 FROM THEIR POINT 6F VIEW

condition in this particular. On one occasion I

asked, " What makes you think that Mrs. is

fat? Her rings are slipping from her fingers."
" Ah, but she has a fet voice. Eh, but Fd rather
be lean."

We all think that the poor are entitled to the
benefit of the kindly impulses of our hearts, but
we are strangely slow to believe that human
feUowship demands that we should devote some
part of our brains to them in addition. If a poor
man complains of any hardship in his lot, do not
let us ease our mind by giving him *' the price of
a pint," or wliatever the equivalent may be in our
social dealings with wage-earners. Let us try and
understand his grievance, dwell on it, weigh it
carefully, trace its cause one step backwards, fore-
cast its immediate results, even if we can do no
more. And it is by no means superfluous, even if
we are convinced of the complainant's good faith,
to remind ourselves daily of certain weighty words
of Adam Smith : " The man scarce lives who is not
more credulous than he ought to be, and who does
not upon many occasions give credit to tales which
not only turn out to be perfectly false, but which a
very moderate degree of reflection and attention
might have taught him could not well be true,"
while an earlier philosopher warns us further :
"Quoique ces personnes n'aient point d'int^rSt k

WHAT IS CHARITY? 215

ce qu'ils disent, il ne faut pas conclure de la absolu-
ment qu'ils ne mentent point."

If we would avoid pauperising the poor, in-
credulity must take rank as one of the first of
social virtues. Even at the present day accurate
knowledge of widespread conditions of life takes a
long time to pass from one class to another, and an
evil may have reached its culminating point and
may have found a natural remedy before we are
well aware of its existence. Just as the trader
follows the missionary, and the soldier too often
follows the trader, social legislation comes fast_jon
the heels of charitable impulse, and while the most
foolish of individuals may be cheaply reconverted
to some less harmful doctrine, a law once passed
can rarely be wiped clean from the statute book.

Perhaps the most necessary mental acquirement
for the poor at the present day is the ability to
spread out unequal earnings equally over the en-
tire year. The successful professional or business
man has not only to do this but to average the
gains of several years before he can fix a reasonable
standard of living for himself and his family ; but
when one considers that alternations of feast and
famine, scrape and squander are by no means un-
known among the middle classes, such self-control
cannot immediately be expected of the lower
divisions of workers, and unhappily it is those who

2i6 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

are most affected by seasonal trades. Foresight is
still so little developed among the poor that few
of them seem really to grasp the conditions of
the occupation by which they earn their Uving.
They do not, for example, regard themselves as
persons earning £2 a week for forty weeks and a
few uncertain shillings for the remaining twelve,
and accept the fact that this means some 30s.
a week all the year through. Eighty pounds
a year is a sum on which a family of the
ordinary size can live in comfort, but not if it is
subjected to the wholly unnecessary and self-
imposed tax of selling £20 or £30 worth
of personal and household possessions every
slack season for the price of old lumber, and
gradually replacing them at full cost when trade
is brisk. If men and their wives could but grasp
what is meant by average wages, a constantly re-
curring excuse for State aid and charitable doles
would be removed, and most of the hardships
and degradations of their lives would be swept
away.

IX

The Practical Drawbacks of Small Farms

Farming on a small scale is the favourite
panacea at the present moment for many social
ills, notably that of unemployment. That any
man well understanding what he is about and
desiring to purchase a parcel of land should be
hindered from doing so is an injustice, and may
be a personal misfortune ; but that large numbers
of men should be bribed, persuaded, and entreated
to enter on a life which they have scarcely one
of the many qualities necessary for leading suc-
cessfully, would amount to a national misfortune
and stimulate no trade but that of the money-
lender.

Some enthusiasts advocate small holdings
because convinced that the produce would be
incalculably greater than from large farms ; others
because they imagine the life of the farmer to be
so much more elevating than that of the wage-
earner and that it creates a type of character in

2i8 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

which tireless energy is somehow combined with
contentment ; others because, although recognising
that the net profit to the community may be
uncertain, and the life of the farmer and his wife (
narrow, harassing, and austere, the small holder I
breeds a hardy race of sons and daughters. The
superfluous sons, one gathers, are to be food for
powder, and no one troubles about the daughters.

Let us abandon theories for a few moments
and come down to plain facts, most of them open
to the observation of all men and women and
many of them thrust upon the notice of every
housekeeper living in the country or in any of
those towns which remain in close touch with the
country. We all recognise the economic dis-
abilities of the small shopkeeper: in a village,
or in the workmen's quarters of a town, he may
manage to exist by charging high prices or by sell-
ing a poor quality of goods ; but unless in addition
he shows prudence and even hard-heartedness
in the matter of giving credit, he will soon be
ruined. The small farmer's power to charge his
immediate neighbours a high price is narrowly
limited, and many of his goods have to be sold
at low rates because they are obviously inferior
to what can be brought to market by men with
more command of labour, better appliances, and
the mechanical skill arising from greater division

\

DRAWBACKS OF SMALL FARMS 219

of employment. Go into the largest shop in a
country town and ask for butter on what is
locally called *'the wrong day." If you are a
good customer you will be told : "I wouldn't
recommend you to buy more than you really need,
m'm. To-morrow we shall have it in from a big
dairy that we can depend on. What comes from
the small farms is well enough if it can be sold
and eaten within three days, but I end by passing
a great deal of it over to the pastry cook. Why
do I buy it ? Well, all the winter they run into
debt with me for groceries, and when the summer
comes I must take what I can get or lose my
money altogether. Just look at those two couple
of fowls — breasts as keen as a knife, no pretence
at being what you could call a good table bird ;
but it was a case of that or nothing." Go to
another shop and repeat your demand, and you
will be offered "lovely Danish." "But why sell
foreign butter when you have scores of dairies
close at hand ? " "I find you can't depend on
the small farmers' butter. I mean you can't even
depend on getting it. One promises me ten
pounds, another fifteen, and so on. Very well ;
one week they can't get anyone to do the churning,
and another the wife is ill, or the butter "runs
short," or the market price has dropped a penny
and they suddenly decide that it isn't worth their

220 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

while to make it, and they don't even take the
trouble to send me a postcard. I am sick of being
found fault with by my customers for what I can't
help, so I stick to Danish and a little Jersey
once a week. New-laid eggs? Well, all I can
guarantee is that they were not more than a
week old when I bought them. The small farms
only send them in once a week, and no one knows
where they've been lying in the meantime. With
careless treatment eggs can be older and mustier
in three hours than they would be in three weeks
if they were handled properly."

In one rural district where land was cheap and
easily obtained, I bought eggs for several weeks
from a small farmer. They tasted exactly as I
have known eggs taste which came from an
** Elephant and Castle " back yard, and were pre-
sented to me by most inconveniently grateful
patients. In vain I reminded myself that the sales-
man had twenty-two acres of land on a wind-swept
hill. No amount of faith could season those eggs,
and at last I went to see where the fowls were kept.
There were some fifty fowls in a house designed
(by the advertiser) for forty, but in which I know
from practical experience that not more than five-
and-twenty should have plept. This house opened
on to a wired run so small that when food was
flung into it a large proportion never reached the

DRAWBACKS OF SMALL FARMS 221

ground — the birds ate it off one another's backs.
" Do you never let them out ? " I asked. " Not
often : they do such a lot of damage." I dared
not ask how often the run was shifted, but if it
had been done five times a day the birds could not
have been in a sufficiently clean condition.

Go then to the com stores, and ask the
proprietor why he has sent your pony almost
uneatable hay, and he tells you, in a burst of con-
fidence which (from a country point of view) is
full compensation for any injury you have suffered :
"Truth is, the hay factors stole a march on me.
They bought up nearly all that was worth having,
and I have had to take some from the small
farmers. They're always short of labour, and of
course nothing can be properly done. Last time I
was out that way I counted five haystacks with
chimneys to em." In their unguarded moments
all the other tradesmen will give you similar
information.

With regard to the milk from small farms, the
consumer who cannot be ignorant of its history
needs the support of fatalism with regard to germs
of disease and a robust indifference to mere dirt.
From a lane which commanded a full view of the
ceremony, I recently watched the milking of seven
cows. On the arrival of the neighbour who was
to take the cans into the town, an old man who

22 2 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

had recently been very ill and had distinguished
himself by firmly declining to wash for nearly
seven weeks, hurried to the meadow, and with the
aid of a dog collected the animals, while a small boy
recovering from whooping-cough went in search
of his eldest brother and the one labourer em-
ployed. The father was dealing with manure half
a field oflF, and dropped his fork and came forward
as soon as the cows had been drawn up on the
filthy piece of ground in front of the house where
ducks, fowls, pigs, and geese were running about
freely. His wife, who had been plucking fowls for
market, came out with three pails, one of which
she gave to her husband, and after hesitating for
a minute or two, and observing the neighbour's
impatience to be gone, took another herself and
began milking. Presently the two young men
arrived and she returned to the house, leaving
them to finish the work. Not one of these four
persons was even provided with an apron. Later
on I asked the woman if the cows were yielding
well. She sighed with fatigue and despondency :
" They're not giving above half what they should
be, but if cows don't have water, how can they
give milk ? We've had to haul every drop for the

last fortnight." "How does Mr. manage

with all his horses and cows?" "Oh, he's been
to a lot of expense. My husband says he doesn't

DRAWBACKS OF SMALL FARMS 223

know what it didn't cost him ; but of course we
can't go in for that. A week's dry weather we can
stand, but if it goes beyond that we're about done
for." Incidentally I asked how often cow-sheds
had to be cleaned out. She brightened up as she
thought of this blessing in her lot: "Not any
oftener than you like. Over there" — indicating
another county — "you've got to clean 'em out
every day and limewash *em every fortnight."

This spring in another district I was talking to
a small farmer's wife, and she told me— half proud,
half tearful : " We lost thirteen piglings last night.
It turned very cold, and there wasn't anyone
to do anything for them, and they all froze. We
lost two lambs with the cold last week, and there's
two more I don't think we shall save. My father
had a big flock of sheep and he had three
shepherds, and they took it turn and turn about
every night at this time of the year ; but just for a
few you can't aflFord to have even one shepherd,
and if you did, he couldn't work night and day."
"What an extraordinary mixture of birds and
animals you keep close to the house," I ventured
to remark. "Do they never try to kill one
another?" "They does sometimes, but it's so
convenient to have them close at hand when they
have to be fed. I've so many other things to see
to, and it's such a business for a woman walking

224 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

about in all weathers. With animals to look after
you don't get a bit of peace not from morning till
night. I do a bit of sewing in the winter, but the
rest of the time things have to hold together as
best they can." The next day a turkey cock killed
a very fine bufi* Orpington hen, and another lamb
died. Within a week some enemy — nominally a
fox — ^got into the hen roost, where there were large
openings only stuffed up with rags ; but a splendid
peacock, which happened to have taken shelter
there, shrieked so appallingly that the unidentified
enemy killed it and fled. The first person who
examined the corpse declared that it had been
"gnawn," but the question has not yet been
settled.

The small farmer and his family can no more
help these things from happening than the small
shopkeeper can keep his goods from becoming
damaged by crowded storage and slow sale. How
to supply sufficient labour without paying for it is
the ever-recurring problem, especially as all work
has to be done with the poorest implements and
appliances, and there is neither money nor energy
to remedy even the most time-destroying incon-
veniences. The wife is usually a willing slave up
to and even beyond the limit of her strength, and
sometimes the children also are zealous, but very
rarely. I found a farmer's only son, aged six, in

DRAWBACKS OF SMALL FARMS 225

sole charge of three cows, which he was to drive
slowly along the lanes, allowing them to feed as
they went. ** Will they do what you tell them ? "
I asked. " They've got to ! " he replied sturdily.
Two years later I often saw him spend the whole
summer evening riding the horse that worked some
primitive machinery. At nine years old he rose as
early as his father, and all the time before and after
and between school hours was spent in work. He
is eleven now ; there are few things that he cannot
do, but I doubt if he will do any of them much
longer. But as a rule the boys protect themselves
only too well. Another small landowner close by
has six sons. The first and second were not
especially averse to farming, but neither were they
particularly useful at home, and the father hastened
to place one as a labourer on a large farm and
allowed the other to find a situation for himself
in some stables. The third son detested the
ceaseless drudgery, and ultimately ran away ^ and
disappeared. The fourth was permitted to take a
situation at a shop in the nearest town, or he
would probably have done the same. " Can you
manage without him?" I asked the mother.
" Well, it don't hardly seem as if we can, but Jim'll
soon be able to leave school, and I've been a bit
stronger myself lately ; and then boys is never
much good when there's creatures to be fed." Nearly
15

226 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

eighteen months later I was surprised to find Jim
still at school, and thought I had somehow lost
count of his age. "No," said his mother, "he's
fourteen, goin' on fifteen, but his father says he'd
sooner have him at school than what he'd be
bothered with him about the place. He's give
him black arms and black legs more than once,
but he couldn't get a bit o' work out of him. He
says he'll have to make out as best he can till
Jack's fit to help him." It will be some time
before Jack can cross his father's hopes ; at present
he is not quite three, and divides his energies very
fairly between slapping the only girl and dropping
miscellaneous articles into the pig's trough. The
arch opponents of the man who wishes for a small
holding will always be those of his own household.

I have no statistics on the subject, but after
nearly nine years' observation of families on holdings
ranging from five to two hundred acres, I doubt
whether there is any class where hard drinkers
and gamblers are as numerous among husbands,
where so many wives die prematurely or linger in
a state of health which makes life a daily burden,
where so many of the daughters are misshapen
and deformed by hard work undertaken at too
early an age, or where the sons so frequently fall
into wasteful and vicious habits.

It is almost impossible for the small farmer's wife

DRAWBACKS OF SMALL FARMS 227

to obtain help with her house and dairy work or
with her pigs and poultry. Even if she is willing
to pay thirty or forty per cent, higher wages than
the surrounding gentry and shopkeepers, her house
is boycotted by all respectable parents on account
of the casual and low-class labour employed by her
husband, unmarried men "oflF the roads," taking
their meals in the kitchen and sleeping in sheds ;
while for her children's sake she is often forced to
refuse the women and girls whose rough and care-
less assistance is at her disposal.

I recently read a statement that "one million
families could be supported on the waste land
of England." No one doubts that they could be
supported on the desert of Sahara by the involun-
tary subscriptions of the rest of the world, but
could they support themselves? Although the
construction of the sentence is a trifle ambiguous,
the writer doubtless meant to express his belief
that they could, but it is difficult to say on what
the belief is founded. Has there been an enormous
rise in the value of agricultural produce, or immense
improvements in methods capable of being applied
on a small scale by women and children and partly
trained men, or have a million men with a genius
for farming, and provided with families of the right
size, age, and disposition, been suddenly created ?

To the ignorant, and apparently to many en-

228 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

thusiastio persons who cannot — and certainly do
not wish to— plead ignorance, one piece of land
is of the same value as another. Earth, with a
little political aid, is as homogeneous and as
divisible as metal A hundred-acre farm can be
turned by mere measurement into five, ten, or
even fifty excellent holdings. In face of me, as
I write, is a twenty-acre meadow surrounded by
high hedges, adorned by five mighty elms, and
covered with the richest-looking grass. To the
inexperienced eye it is as good as it is beautiful,
but the farmer who leases it " in with the rest "
of his two hundred odd acres tells me : ^' It is so
damp that half the year it is of no manner of use
to me. Cows can stand a good bit of wet, but
not that" In an exceptionally dry year, this
quality of the ground might even be of advantage ;
but suppose that meadow, or a portion of it, were
the sole support of a family ? Three years ago,
an ambitious young man, steady, industrious,
recently married, unwittingly hired a small farm
composed of such land. Three months ago he was
" sold up," and left it accompanied by his wife,
two babies, and a handful of clothing. He had
lost everything else, including what to the ordinary
man of twenty-eight is his most valuable asset —
his health. As long as he lives rheumatic fever
will play cat and mouse with him.

DRAWBACKS OF SMALL FARMS 229

And what of the hardy breed of sons and
daughters ? Both parents are usually overworked,
but especially the mother, and poor as the produce
of the farm may be, it is the poorest part that
falls to the share of the producers. Except in the
case of illness, nothing of marketable value must
be used. In the majority of cases, it would be
found that the children have less butter, milk, and
eggs than the children of the man earning about
a guinea a week ; and if they have more meat, it
is meat of a quality that it would be difficult and
even dangerous to sell. The housing, especially
with regard to bedrooms, is often exceedingly bad,
and the ignorance of all matters connected with
the preservation of health is far denser than among
ordinary sociable workmen and their wives. Given
these facts, what results can be expected ?

^

X

The Spending of the Superfluous

The existence of the superfluous, of more than is
necessary for the continuance of life and health
and activity, may be attributed to society as a
whole ; the proportion of the superfluous that falls
to any large class depends upon the general
abilities of that class ; but the expenditure of the
superfluous is to a great extent a matter of
individual choice, and supplies a key, not only
as to moral character, but as to intellect. One's
first observation is, however, that the amount of
the superfluous is estimated very differently by
the majority of the workers receiving it and by
more cultivated onlookers.

The number of superfluities that can be bought
on a family income of a pound a week is simply
amazing to witness, but this is partly because
necessities, from certain points of view, are so
narrowly limited. Even in homes where there is
double or treble that sum coming in weekly, it is

SPENDING OF THE SUPERFLUOUS 231

by no means unusual to find that one cheap comb,
^th half its teeth missing, serves for six or seven
people without the help of a single hairbrush ; one
broom, unaided by a dustpan, sweeps wood, stone,
or matting, as the case may be ; the same tin or
earthenware basin is used to wash the dinner
things, to bath the baby, to make a pudding-, to
mix starch, or is brought to the district nurse
to use for her patient. In the poorest houses,
however, there are almost invariably photographs,
vases, and ornaments in abundance, besides a con-
siderable number of articles designed for use, but
considered too good for the purpose, and rang-
ing in size from a sofa to a drinking cup or a
pincushion.

I doubt if any real conversation between
members of two classes is possible. All my
conversations with my patients and their friends
have been of an exceedingly one-sided character;
that is to say, in some cases I talked, and in some
they did, but we never took anything like equal
parts. A question, a shade of surprise, the faintest
dissent from their views, the lack of instant appro-
bation, would generally be enough to silence them,
and in many instances cause them to veer round
suddenly, and bring forward opinions in direct
opposition to those they had already expressed.
Anxiety for their health always made me extremely

232 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

anzioas to introduce any labour-saving appliances
within their means, and I spent a considerable
part of my time in eulogising the inventor of
oilcloth. As a substitute for carpet one may call
it execrable, but as an impermeable covering for
boards, to prevent the necessity of scrubbing them,
it is excellent, and my advice to my patients
always was: '*Go without everything but food
until you have covered your kitchen and passage
with oilcloth and a few mats. Never scrub if you
can help it, and, when it cannot be avoided, use
very little water and let that water be hot and
clean." But this was never a popular method of
laying out the superfluous : they preferred scrub-
bing, and then spending indefinite sums at the
chemist's on embrocation for rheumatism or oint-
ment for a bad knee.

It often seems to me that the smaller the income
the larger the proportion of it that is spent in
drugs. "A bottle of stuff' from the chemist's"
ranks higher than anything direct from a doctor,
probably because more money has to be paid for it.
People who declare that it is useless to expect the
poor to spend three-halfpence on a tooth brush
have little conception of the number of sixpenny
and even shilling bottles of "toothache mixture"
that are bought and paid for in even the poorest
districts, -

SPENDING OF THE SUPERFLUOUS 233

In all classes of life people can rise to meet a
fresh responsibility. A few years ago a dentist in
an unfashionable quarter told me : ** We have been
so busy we have not known which way to turn,
owing to these new post-office regulations refusing
to employ girls with neglected teeth. Whenever I
got a chance, I was always on at their parents for the
shameful way they let their children's teeth decay,
when with I little attention they might keep a
very decent and useful set; but they preferred
spending their money on things no more necessary
for them than they are to the man in the moon.
But it is all changed now ; they know which side
their bread is buttered."

The desire for powerful medicines, and more
particularly for those bitter in taste or effervescent,
is especially strong among the aged poor. Half
the complaints of many of the workhouse inmates,
when they come out to see their friends, are of
the obstinacy of the doctor and nurses in not
allowing them to have what they demand in that
line.

"Doctor say it would kill I to have 'un,"
grumbled one old man, and he would not rest
until he had circumvented this mean and grudging
dispenser of medical comforts by spending his few
pence at a more obliging chemist's, and the pre-
scription was swallowed without the prophesied

234 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

result. He told me, however, that he had once
followed a doctor's advice, and thought that he
owed the last forty years of his life to his good
sense in doing so : "I worked underground for
seven years, and then the doctor said if I did stay
any longer I would want a wooden dress, so I did
come up and go back to farm work."

The usual price for a herbalist's prescription
seems to be half a crown^ and to communicate it
to a neighbour — ^possibly suffering from a totally
unrelated disease — is a favourite form of charity ;
it may also be an act of friendship. This is one of
several recipes given to me by an aged cobbler:
" For weak eyes : buy a pennyworth of white
copperas and two ounces of sugar. Throw half of
the copperas away and boil the remainder with the
sugar in a pint of water until it is reduced to half
a pint. To be applied twice a day." I dared not
ask whether it was impossible either to buy a
halfpennyworth of copperas or to use a quart of
water, but the importance of " throwing away haK"
was specially impressed on me.

Foreigners look upon the love of strong drugs
as a peculiarly English trait, and believe it to be
coupled with innate power to resist their effects.
A Swiss chemist told me that he often made up
prescriptions for Englishmen that he would be
ftfraid to give to continentals, In fact, "An

SPENDING OF THE SUPERFLUOUS 235

Englishman's dose" is their equivalent expression
for our " Enough to kill a horse."

As a child I remember hearing the doctor of a
great convict prison, who was much troubled by
malingerers, describe how he had tried to clear
them out of the hospital by the size and nauseous-
ness and frequency of the doses of medicine ; but
the more he did this, the more the men crowded in.
He reversed the system, and made the portions
small and few and tasteless, and the infirmary lost
all attraction except for those really ill. It gave a
pitiful idea of the appalling dulness of a convict's
life, and the recollection has made me understand
why the poorer and more uneducated my patients
are, and the more monotonous their outward and
inward life, the more readily they spend money on
quack medicines. I seldom find them popular
among those who are eager newspaper readers, or
in any way display voluntary activity of mind or
body. Dulness and apathy probably cause as
many follies and as much waste of time and money
as excessive love of pleasure and excitement. To
detect malingerers, by the way, used to be con-
sidered the main part of the duties of naval and
mUitary surgeons in times of peace. Even twenty
years ago this conception was still in full force, and
I well remember the unpleasant sidelight thrown
upon the matter by a Scotch inspector-general who

236 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

protested indignantly, "The puir fellows, how
many are driven to their death I Whenever a
man's too ignorant to know what's the matter with
them, and too lazy to find out, he says they're
shamming, and he can always find commanding
officers ready to believe him."

Among all classes of wage-earners the superior
type of parents are most anxious to spend part of
the superfluous upon the higher education of their
children ; but they are often pathetically ignorant
as to what branches of learning it will be best for
them to devote their time to, and still more vague
as to the degree of proficiency in any art or science
which enables man or woman to earn a decent
living by it. They are also lamentably in want of
exact information as to the expense which must be
incurred, directly and indirectly, before satisfactory
results can be expected. It is pitiable to see fond
fathers and mothers spending money they can iU
afibrd to pay for lessons in music or painting for
boys and girls who have not a grain of musical or
artistic ability beyond what is common to the
normal human being, encouraging and even
compelling them to " practise," and " get on with
their drawing" for many hours a day, doing all
the house work, lest they should spoil their hands,
and totally unable to see, until it is too late, that
instead of giving their children a good trade, they

SPENDING OF THE SUPERFLUOUS 237

are preparing for them a future of bitter
disappointment, harassing anxiety, and semi-
starvation.

Popular opinion throws the blame of these de-
ceptive dreams and fatal miscalculations entirely
upon the young people themselves and their
supposed aversion to physical labour, but more
often than not they were originated by their
parents, and persisted in with blind infatuation
and in spite of the children's frequent rebellion
against the almost unbearable drudgery and
privation, and their occasional gleams of common-
sense and their half-understanding of the useless-
ness and injuriousness of the plans laid out for
their social advancement. I knew one young lad
with far more gift for music than is usual among
these victims of mistaken parental ambition who
saved himself for a better fate by declaring firmly,
" I am not a genius, and I do not wish to live
and die as a twentieth-rate bandsman " ; but such
clear-sightedness, accompanied by the necessary
tenacity, is rare at any age.

Even if the parents' choice is a good and reason-
able one in itself, their ignorance on the third
point — the inevitable cost in money and in time^
frequently causes not merely disappointment to
themselves but utterly disastrous results to their
children. This is especially the case with very

238 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

poor parents who allow clever boys or girls to
become pupil teachers without in the least realis-
ing how long it will be before they can earn their
entire livelihood, and the quality and amount of
food which is indispensable in order that young
people may safely bear the threefold strain of
growing, learning, and teaching.

" If I'd known what it would mean," said the
intelligent wife of a labourer, *^ Katie should ha
gone to service same as her sister done. Her
health has broke down, and I've had her a whole
year doing nothing at all ; now she's going up for
the examination again, but I'm afraid there isn't
much chance for her, and it'll just be the same
old tale over again. The doctor says that if she
is to study like that, we ought to give her plenty
of fish and mutton and all sorts of things, but how
can we? I only wish it had never been begun.
One thing, I haven't let her grow up like many
teachers does. She knows how to turn her hand
to everything in a house just as well as her sister
does. But there ! If she hasn't the strength left to
do it, it don't make much odds what she knows or
what she don't know."

I knew a vigorous, energetic, ambitious widow
left "with a trade" and three children, and she
determined that they should all become school
teachers, "cost what it may." The daughter has

SPENDING OF THE SUPERFLUOUS 239

almost died from anaemia caused by mental and
physical strain on poor food, one of the sons is at
present in an asylum, and the other is extremely
likely to follow him. In another family where
the parents are sober, steady-going, perfectly
normal people, and the father earning a good
living at an outdoor occupation, one son devoted
to " art " has already paid two visits to an asylum
and is again showing symptoms of the most hope-
less form of mental disease, one is earning a
miserable pittance, and the only daughter is
almost entirely incapacitated by anaemia.

These victims to the ignorant, well-intentioned,
self-sacrificing spending of the superfluous are
simply innumerable, and it is the more deeply to
be regrietted because the parents are usually
estimable people, and the children, though not
geniuses, are above the average in intellect and
-until the recUess and unnecessary strain comes
— ^are also above it in physical strength.

Parents as a whole are certainly more anxious
about the education of their children than they
used to be, and the State concerns itself with the
matter more closely every year ; but when listen-
ing to the life stories of prosperous workmen and
successful house-mothers of sixty, seventy, eighty,
and more years of age, one sometimes wonders if
the young people themselves are as eager about

240 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

self-culture in any form as many of them nn-
doubtedly were in former days. A clever old
countryman, employed by rich and poor alike
when work of any skill and nicety has to be done,
said to me recently, " When I were young, if I did
want to learn anything I gived a coat. Now you
do have to give a coat to get anyone to learn any-
thing. I do keep saying to my grandson. Keep
your eyes open, learn everything you can. What
would become of me if I knowed nothing but hard
work, now my strength be three parts gone?
But I don't know where their wits is to. By six
o'clock of a summer afternoon they look to be a
mile away from their work with a clean collar
round their necks. Ah, everyone be wantin' I.
They do snap I up. I give a day here and a day
there just for to content them." But until old
age and impaired strength come, there is much to
be said against having more than one trade ; for it
often results in men's having to work hard at both,
and earning less than if they had only one. " I
know as much about gardening as anyone else,
but I take good care not to," I was told by a
country groom. *' I get 23s. a week as a groom,
and a groom-gardener is lucky if he gets a guinea.
Plenty of them get 17s. and a little green stuff.'*

In many families a considerable proportion of the
superfluous is spent on furniture which in no way

SPENDING OF THE SUPERFLUOUS 241

adds to the immediate comfort of the possessors ;
but as this form of outlay is almost invariably a
sign that they are on the upward grade, the pur-
chases are by no means to be scorned. It may
be sad to find that the best room in the house Js
only an air-tight storing-place for the accumulated
treasure, that the fixed bath is used as a soiled-
linen basket, and that the jugs in the handsome
toilet sets are filled with paper instead of water,
while the proud owners still go downstairs unwashed
and perform their unwilling ablutions at the sink a
couple of hours later. Nevertheless, the habit of
working and saving to obtain these things has been
formed ; they add greatly to self-respect, and the
next generation, or even the younger members of
the existing one, will acquire the habit of using
them. It is true that there are instances where this
desire for fine furniture is so premature as to be
sheer folly. A few weeks ago, for example, a woman
living in a wretched cottage with a leaking roof
and not a single dry wall offered to give £X0
ready money for a second-hand piano for which she
had no more direct use than was implied by the
vaguely expressed intention of " letting ^her little
girl begin music." It might be said in her defence
that the cottage was not her own, and that any
money laid out on it might have been lost ; but she

could have had a far better house fifty yards away
16

242 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

for the same rent if she would have engaged it
by the quarter instead of the week ; and a person
who could afford to spend nearly a year's rent on an
article that she did not need would surely have been
justified in risking the loss that might be entailed
by such an unlikely combination of events as that
her steady-going husband should be suddenly dis-
missed from his employment, and be unable to find
any other berth within cycling distance. Also
there were house-owners in the same hamlet who
spent the superfluous chiefly on fine clothes (men
and women alike), while their roofs and walls were
in very little better condition than hers.

Comfort is rarely studied, but is it only among the
poor, and only in private life, that appearance ranks
before reality ? A few years ago the captain of the
largest passenger ship then in existence told me :
"The company have just spent £10,000 in
re-decorating the first-class passengers' quarters,
and, for all the passengers care, they might just as
well have spent a couple of hundred on a fresh coat
of paint. But, can you believe it? I had the
greatest dijQficulty in the world in inducing them to
buy an afternoon tea-set for the ladies' saloon. Tea
was served in cups as large as basins and as thick
as jam-pots-— enough to disgust a schoolboy. At
last I said I should have to buy one at my own
expense and put it in the steward's charge ; and then

\

SPENDING OF THE SUPERFLUOUS 243

they gave in and sent a very decent one. I dare-
say it came to fourpence a piece, but at anyrate
women could get it between their teeth without
dislocating their jaws.*'

Asa general rule, a surprisingly small proportion
of the surplus is spent on more abundant or more
delicate food. When people have once risen beyond
the point of wasting the margin on drink or
remaining idle rather than earn a margin, their
desires are for better clothes, more amusement,
better furniture, and better prospects for their
children. The demand for better housing comes
very late, and if circumstances make it easy for the
less advanced to obtain good quarters, they and their
children profit little by them. In five and seven
roomed houses supplied with every convenience
and occupied by a single family I have sometimes
found an appalling amount of dirt and a simply
poisonous atmosphere. Those who can keep two
rooms in good order can generally rise to three, and
those who have managed four or five for a con-
siderable time may rise to seven ; ordinary human
nature changes gradually, and not by leaps and
bounds.

The only way of learning to spend the superfluous
wisely is to possess it and have the control of it ;
but the lessons of experience will be far more quickly
laid to heart if aided by principles that can to some

244 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

extent be taught at school ; and the advantage of
having such a mixed population that there are
suitable examples close at hand cannot easily be
overrated. We are often told that an ounce of
practice is worth a pound of theory, but in my
daily rounds I see tons of experience utterly wasted
for lack of any principles by which it can be co-
ordinated. And, above all, one must dismiss the
idea that thrift is mere abstinence. As an old
sailor told me very truly, " Any dam' fool can save.
The difficulty lies in spending."

XI

Why the Poor prefer Town Life

The fundamental reason why the countryman
forsakes the village for the town is because, as
a sentient being, he naturally seeks surroundings
which he believes will reduce his pains and increase
his satisfactions.

The reason why he believes that this more
favourable environment will be found in a great
city may in some cases be because he is by nature
unsuited to outdoor work, or to work that must
to a large extent be done without the stimulus of
constant companionship, but it is usually because
he has not the right education either to enable
him to enjoy the pleasures and interests that the
country affords, or to reduce its undeniable hard-
ships, deprivations, and discomforts to a bearable
point.

Very many of those anxious to maintain, or
create, or reinstate, — whichever word they may

chance to use, — a large rural population, do not

245

246 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

in the least know what rural life meant to the
poor of the previous three generations, nor have
they any practical knowledge of what it means to
them at the present moment. For their ideas of
the past they seem to be chiefly indebted to
novelists — ^not contemporary novelists, but mere
romancists — and their conception of living reality
seems to be founded partly upon hasty reading
of hastily formed generalisations and partly upon
imagination of an unsympathetic and totally un-
trained description.

Delightful pictures are drawn in modem novels
of the old-fashioned farm and its peace and plenty,
and the exquisite cleanliness and unbroken health
and prosperity of the inmates. We may perhaps
catch a fleeting glimpse of the labourers at the
lower end of the table, but they are always lads,
or else crusty and trusty old bachelors. Where
the parents of these young people may be, how
they themselves must live if they get married,
does not seem to concern the writers or the.
readers, and yet by how many the labourers
outnumbered the farmers, and how wretched their
average condition was ! At the present day they
are decidedly better oflF, but does the life of a
country labourer, the total return that he gets
for his work, bear a fair comparison, from his
point of view and counting only the advantages

I

WHY THE POOR PREFER TOWN LIFE 247

«

that he can appreciate, with the total return
received by town labourers who are, roughly
speaking, his equals mentally, morally, and
physically ?

Here are three out of many similar cases which
have come under my notice during the current
year. A middle-aged man appealed to me one
night for help to bury his youngest child, aged
four, who had died after a brief illness. It was
only the funeral expenses, he said, that he was
unable to meet, and he was anxious that the
interment should take place as soon as possible,
as he had another child of seven seriously ill.

" I thank my God," he added, " that as long as
she lived she had everything she wanted, both
from me and her mother. I don't doubt she's
gone to a better place, but I do take it hard to
lose her, for she always stuck to me. The mom^it
I was back from my work, there she was, and
there wasn't a word you could say to her that she
didn't understand. She was most wonderful
sharp. The last three nights I never had my
clothes oflF." I knew nothing of the man's
circumstances, but I was impressed by his
sincerity, and finding that his master, a working
fanner, and several villagers of still narrower means
had subscribed, I did the same, postponing any
inquiries into his statements until after the funeral.

248 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

I found that^ he had five children entirely
dependent on him, and that his wife was in very
poor health. He was a steady and regular worker,
acquainted with the whole round of farm labour.
His wages were 13s. a week, a garden that
he had not sufficient time at his disposal to
make full use of, and a four-roomed cottage in
exceedingly bad repair and in such an isolated
position that his wife received very little of the
neighbourly help of which she was in so much
need. Drinking water had to be carried nearly
half a mile, and the nearest shop was five times
that distance away. The walls and floor of the
house were damp, and a man trying to describe the
state of the roof said to me, "You could put a
wheel -barrer through it," but even this scarcely
gives an adequate idea of its condition. I doubt
if there was a square yard where a man could not
have thrust his fist through it from inside or out.
The kitchen had a stone floor, and as damp stone
rots all the cheaper kinds of floor covering, it was
almost bare ; the door opened straight into this
living-room and was inmiediately opposite the
fireplace, but in this place the children had to be
nursed, because there was no means of lighting a
fire anywhere else. The little girl had never been
ill before, and in all probability had not succumbed
so much to the disease as to the conditions under

WHY THE POOR PREFER TOWN LIFE 249

which she was nursed, added to the lack of timely
advice as to the best practicable method of
counteracting the influence of these conditions.
There was no nurse in the district, the parish
doctor had been sent for rather late, and being
much occupied, had not obeyed the summons until
the afternoon of the following day.

In what circumstances would a town labourer of
equal steadiness and intelligence have been living ?
His wages would not have been under 23s.
throughout the year, and he would have worked
on an average two hours a day less to earn that
amount. The rent and taxes of a small house, not
as far distant from his work as the agricultural
labourer's often is from his, would be 5 s. a
week, or a little less. This dwelling, unlike the
cottage, would be wind and water tight, and would
have drainage, unlimited water-supply, and regular
removal of refuse matter ; all the floors would be
boarded, all the ceilings lath and plastered, and three
rooms out of the four or five would have chimneys.
The children would be close to their school, a serious
consideration during the first few years of their
attendance, and the wife would be near the shops
instead of painfully carrying her heavy purchases
for a couple of miles through heat, cold, rain, or
darkness. The advantages of various provident and
insurance societies would be much more pressed

7 so FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

upon the husband, and he would belong to one or
more ; there would always be neighbours at hand to
help his wife or keep an eye on the children, and
trained nurses to rely on in times of special stress.

In the second instance, the youngest of eight
children (six still at home) contracted pneumonia,
and she also had to be nursed in the stone-floored
kitchen which opened immediately on to the garden
and was the only possible means of exit and
entrance for the whole family. Not only this, but
keeping up a fire at night made one of the two
bedrooms uninhabitable, owing to the choking
clouds of smoke which reached it through some
defect in chimney and partition wall. The five
children had to take possession of the front room,
and both parents slept in the kitchen with the
invalid. The child was strong and healthy and the
mother devoted, and it was not until the eighth
day that she died. Under the ordinary housing
conditions of a town, and with a doctor who would
have attended such a critical case six or eight times
instead of twice, and with a nurse to give authori-
tative and detailed advice, I firmly believe that
the child's life could have been saved. She also
was specially dear to her father.

The eldest of the family told me : ** The last night
mother was so worn out that we made her go to
bed with the children, and father and I sat up

WHY THE POOR PREFER TOWN LIFE 251

together. At six o'clock I made him some toast for
his breakfast, and Kitty brightened up and asked
him for a piece of it, and he buttered a little strip
for her. She only just put her lips to it and gave it
back to him, but he went oflF to work quite cheerful,
thinking she was better. He can hardly have been
gone twenty minutes when she died." Had either
of these men much reason to love the country ?

The villager who had tried to describe the roof
of the first man's cottage was ill himself a little
later on, and lay week after week in an oppressively
low room with one small window from which he
could see nothing. " Has the vicar been to visit
you ? " I asked one day when conversation flagged.
" Not he ! I 'xpect he's afraid to come and see such
a black sheep." " A sheep ? Perhaps he takes you
for a fierce old wolf with that red nightcap on."
" Well," with a pious drawl heavily discounted by
a sarcastic grin, " we all knows that our vile bodies
isn't of no account, but there's our souls to be
thought of."

In the third instance, a man and his wife —
both about eighty years of age, frugal people
who had saved a small independence — ^were living
in a cottage at half a crown a week with one room
and an outhouse downstairs and two bedrooms
on the upper floor. There was no drainage and
no water-supply. As a personal favour, they

252 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

were allowed to fetch half a bucket of drinking
water from a house a hundred yards away (the
nearest spring being fully eight times that
distance), and for the rest they depended upon
a single rain-water barrel A neighbour had
offered to give them a second one, but the
guttering on three sides of the house was so
riddled with holes that they could not have filled
it except with an amount of labour of which
they were no longer capable. In the early part
of the winter the old man was attacked by mortal
illness, and for three months of bitter weather
he lingered in a fireless bedroom, measuring about
eight feet by seven, and decidedly less than seven
feet in height. He was a remarkably tall man,
and in his best days can have found little to
spare between his head and the ceiling. For
some years after the old people rented the house
there had been a chimney to this room, but it
had fallen down piecemeal. The landlord did not
choose to replace it, and they could neither compel
him to do so nor afford to do it themselves ; and
cottages were so scarce that newly married couples
often had to lodge in a single room for a year
or more while awaiting a vacancy. They had
no children left, and during the last six weeks
a relative from a distance came to help with the
nursing. She was a most worthy young woman,

WHY THE POOR PREFER TOWN LIFE 253

and endured the discomforts courageously, but
she spent most of her leisure moments in ex-
plaining to the villagers that if her old uncle
had chosen to "live up" in a large town he
would have had a good bedroom with a fireplace
and a sash window. It happened to be a village
where the inhabitants err on the side of easy
contentment and passive endurance and have a
great fear of town life, but her protests made
a considerable impression upon them.

Exaggerated ideas of the horrors of town life
are often met with in the country. I have
sometimes been distressed to find the poorest
and most ill-housed cottagers giving their pence
and their pity on the strength of appeals which
come dangerously near being false pretences.
Curiously enough, this belief *in the extreme
misery of towns may co-exist with a great desire
to visit them. "How I should like to take my
Emma to Manchester," said a woman living on
the outskirts of a small town. I asked why ; for
as Emma was only six, and very comfortable
where she was, I could not imagine' for what
good purpose she was to be taken there. "Oh,
I should just like her to see all the miserable
children running about with no shoes and stock-
ings, looking for a crust of bread, and with hardly
a rag to cover them ! "

254 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW^

The objections I find most commonly brought
forward by villagers against a country life are
the great length of working hours in summer
and the need for men and boys to supplement
their wages by further work in their own gardens
and allotments, coupled with the great diflficulty
of making any use of the comparative leisure of
the winter months. There is a general prejudice
against women doing any vegetable gardening,
even when they have no young children and
much time on their hands. There are special
complaints of the weariness of attending upon
animals, and very little liking for them or under-
standing of their ways, and the great increase
of dairy farming entails heavy Sunday labour.
Butter need not be made every day, but with
regard to cheese there is no respite. The
loneliness of the life is found less bearable now
that children have become so dependent upon
the excitement of school life, and the lack of
constant companionship during working hours is
considered a trial; townsmen are great talkers,
and countrymen wish to be. There is generally,
though by no means invariably, an absence of
all intellectual interest in country work, of all
aesthetic appreciation of the beauty of natural
surroundings, of all manly determination to wring
from the life the best that it affords. The more

WHY THE POOR PREFER TOWN LIFE 255

active-minded men are depressed by the scarcity
of books and the want of opportunities of self-
improvement on the only lines on which they
can conceive the existence of culture ; and ambitious
parents declare with much truth, "There's no
advantages for the children here. Willy was in
the sixth standard when he was eleven, and there

he is still. Mabel cycles over to G ; there's

a * centre' there, but it do take it out of her,
seven miles and uphill pretty near all the way.
My sister's boys have been at an upper-grade
school for the last two years, and Tm sure they're
not a bit sharper than what Willy is. And then
what openings will there be for them? There's
nothing to be had for boys, nor girls neither,
without sending them right away from home."
To satisfy these natural ambitions, and to prevent
the premature break-up of family life, many
parents give up their employment in the country
and seek work in the nearest town, while very
many more hover miserably upon the edge of
such a momentous decision.

There is a widespread prejudice that all clever
and active people desert the rural districts, and
that only aged persons and idiots remain —
especially idiots. The frequent accusation of
stupidity brought against villagers reminds me
of a lady who tried to pass herself off at a

256 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

health resort as an invalid. After watching her
for a few minutes, a shrewd old north-country-
woman exclaimed, "Eh, but Ah'd laike to see
the well ones where you coom fro' ! " If those
left in the country are the stupid ones, I can
only wonder that towns do not more richly
abound in genius. And in what a meek, matter-
of-course fashion villagers accept this imputation
— no idea of its injustice seems to cross their
minds. I shall never forget the naive gratifica-
tion shown by a class of Sunday-school girls,
ranging in age from fourteen upwards, when I
told them that the Bible had to a great extent
been written by persons who, like themselves,
had grown up in the country, and that therefore
very many of the illustrations and metaphors
used were perfectly plain and open to them,
but often needed elaborate explanation before
they could be comprehended by their town-bred
cousins.

Many of the cleverest inhabitants have remained
behind — that is to say, those who have received, Qr
have given themselves, the education which enables
them to acquire possession of the best houses and
the best gardens, and to constantly improve and
add to them.

Is it possible to find out in what way these
persons were trained to make the most of country

WHY THE POOR PREFER TOWN LIFE 257

life, to conquer its difl&culties and profit by its
advantages? If so, we might at last be on the
road towards a right system of rural education.

Personally, I cannot believe that the solution of
the problem " how to stem the rural exodus " is to
be found in small farming, which means poverty
and idleness for many of the holders, poverty and
ceaseless drudgery for most, and a varying amount
of what in towns we should brand with the name
of " casual employment " for the landless men, who
must inevitably sink far below the position of
labourers on farms large enough to supply work
all the year round.

Many persons who clearly perceive that a small
holding will not supply a decent living for a
family of the ordinary size and the average abili-
ties, nevertheless cherish the belief that men in
possession of a small parcel of land could easily
supplement their income by working part of their
time for wages, and thus be freed from the fitful
cruelty of Nature on the one hand and the fluctua-
tions of the labour market on the other. They
ignore the fact, patent to all practical people, that
any man who carries on two trades ends by re-
ceiving less than if he confined himself to one.

The solution might rather be arrived at by the
gradual re-organisation of country life in such a
manner that it would be possible for the men to
17

258 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

have more leisure, and more varied means of
utilising and enjoying it, and for their families to
have more domestic comfort.

" Fm never free," sighs the industrious country-
man, while his lazy brother instinctively takes
care of himself by remaining idle for weeks at a
time, living on his garden and the general family
resources if he is a householder, and very often
"simplifying life" by being a lodger or sleeping
in a barn when he chooses to work, and going into
the Union for a few months if he wearies of it, or
finds the weather too unpropitious, or his em-
ployers too exacting in the matter of punctuality
and sobriety, or his clothes becoming indecently
shabby.

The boundless belief in country innocence,
country morality, country vigour of body and
independence of mind, is simply inexplicable.
One week's experience of an ordinary village
would surely be enough to expose the fallacy.
I have known men and women and children living
in isolated cottages set in some of the loveliest
places in England whose sordid misery and
crawling viciousness could not be paralleled in the
lowest parts of an old seaport town ; and there are
many so-called " slums " which a respectable
woman might pass through freely for years
without meeting with the gross insults that

WHY THE POOR PREFER TOWN LIFE 259

are often experienced in idyllic villages. When
I hear objections raised to Fresh Air Funds, on the
ground that town children corrupt the rustics, I
am at a loss to know what depths of grossness or
wickedness can be known to them which have not
long since been revealed to every village school-
boy. Possibly much of what is now mere prejudice
may be traced to the revelations of early nine-
teenth-century blue books. They were appalKng
enough, in all conscience, but perhaps even with
regard to old-time factory work our eyes are too
exclusively turned upon its evil side. Physically
it may be difficult to exaggerate the lasting wrong
done by overcrowding and unlimited hours of
work, but on the mental and spiritual side there
may have been more gain than we can well
estimate. Take the first intelligent artisan you
meet, and try to realise that his great-grandfather
was a pauper labourer starved-out in the country
and emigrated into the town at the guardians'
expense, thankful to work a certain twelve hours
a day for an uncertain thirteen shillings a week.
Does he owe most to town or country ? We think
only of the " evil communications " facilitated by
the close daily contact, but a strongly religious
woman over eighty years of age told me towards
the close of the last century that all the moral and
religious teaching she received in early life came

26o FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

from a lad who toiled side by side with her in a
factory. At first she had simply scoffed at him,
but was finally won by the patience and courage
with which he fought against the physical suffering
that ended his life before manhood had weU
begun.

With all history before us, it is high time
that we recognised that neither town nor country
influences working alone can produce a type of
manhood that, for the honour of human nature,
we should care to regard as stable.

XII

The Art of Eepairing

The poor are seldom taught the art of repairing in
its many bearings upon their daily life. Even as a
preparation for the millennium, when everyone will
be well housed, are they encouraged to make the
best of the accommodation at present within their
reach ? The facts seem to be lost sight of that no
one on earth has a perfect house, and no one has
a dwelling so bad that, with care and attention, it
could not be made less injurious to health and less
subversive of comfort. Just as in the religious
sphere there are those who seem to think that death
instantly fits any man for heavenly occupations
and heavenly associates, so in the philanthropic
there are many who seem to believe that you have
merely to provide good houses at someone else's
expense, and everyone will forthwith live, and
continue to live, under healthy conditions. With
all their failings, most municipal authorities are

a little wiser than that : when they receive an

, 261

262 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

appUcation from a would-be tenant, they send an
inspector to see what he makes of the home he
has abeady. I have heard serious complaints that
owing to this the only persons benefited are those
who are so respectable that they could easily have
found suitable houses for themselves ; but when
this plan is adhered to, everyone gets a step up,
and a step at a time is as much as most of us can
manage. Another fact is frequently forgotten by
those in haste to clear out every court and alley
and tenement. The outer fringe of wage-earners
are not yet sufficiently civilised to be able to live
in self-contained houses. No words can express
the pity that I have often felt for the weak members
of a family — and sometimes the weak member is
the husband — living in an isolated cottage or a
house completely shut ofi" from all compulsory inter-
course with the neighbouring ones. In crowded
courts everyone knows everyone else's business, and
to a certain extent interferes with the way they
carry it out. The morals of an excited mob may
be worse than the morals of any one person in
it, but in the usual state of afiairs public opinion
in the worst street is not only more enlightened
than the opinion of the worst dwellers in it, but
holds itself above that of the average inhabitant
when he or she has a " bad day." The men who
happen to be sober restrain the men who happen

THE ART OF REPAIRING 263

to be drunk. The women, though perhaps nearly
all of them display occasional harshness to their
children, and some of them show culpable neglect
or practise gross favouritism, can see these ugly
faults in others ; and the frightened or hungry
child knows where to find food or shelter — and
perhaps the very next week is offering her own
mother's protection to her small friends in distress.
Once a tenant in these favoured Buildings,
however, and direct discouragement is given to the
art of repair. Persons formerly well acquainted
with the use of paint, whitewash, and the paste
brush, when dealing with a large landlord or a
municipality soon learn to insist on having their
ceUings whitened and their walls papered exactly
at the intervals laid down in the bond, although
these intervals are not regulated by the habits of
careful persons who protect the wall at the back of
the sink or behind the frying-pan, who mend the
wall-paper if it gets torn, and prevent the lamp
from smoking, but are founded upon the require-
ments of the careless and indifferent housekeeper.
Tenants often make demands for what they do not
in the least need, convinced that "you don't have
to pay nothing for having it done," and few people
even attempt to make them understand that if
all the inhabitants of the Blocks were careful and
reasonable in these respects, rents would be con-

264 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

siderably lower. To penalise the specially careless
tenants is not always practicable owing to the
generosity of feeling often shown among the poor.
For example, I knew a family who had had their
ceilings injured and their rooms flooded twice by
their overhead neighbours leaving a child of three
to amuse herself with the taps while they enjoyed
their Sunday afternoon nap ; and far from taking
any action against them, they did their best to
hide the damage that had been done. A third
time the same thing happened ; the head of the
downstair family was ill, and the wife was so much
annoyed when hia difficult sleep was disturbed by
a heavy splash of water on his face that, although
she made no open complaint, she was less sedulous
in concealing the injury done to her rooms, and
the reckless neighbours received a week's notice.

In most villages there is a lack of sufficient ac-
commodation, and this is true even of places where
the population is as much as five and twenty per cent,
below the highest point it is known to have reached.
We are told that this is because the countryman
" cannot afford an economic rent." When I observe
the character of his work, I recognise that he
receives its full value ; but when I consider how
he is housed and fed and clothed, and the hours
that he is expected to spend at work, I can only
marvel that the value of his labour is not even less.

THiE ART OF REPAIRING 265

While we are settling the knotty question of how
he can be educated up to the point of earning
enough money to pay an economic rent, instead of
forcing someone else to pay it for him, or by some
jugglery trying to make it appear that no one at
all is bearing the burden of his present incapacity,
or of running up tintack and pasteboard cottages
vying one against the other in cheapness and
chilliness, why not repair and improve the houses
already in existence and being wastefully permitted
to fall into ruins ? In villages where the inhabit-
ants are either disgracefully overcrowded or are
alternately shivering and gasping in the new Tin
Teakettle Row (the favourite popular name), there
are substantially built thick-walled old cottages
needing little but larger windows, the addition of
a bedroom, and the thorough repair of the roof to
turn them into healthier and more comfortable
dwellings than the greater part of these fantastic
brick boxes. I know one middle-aged couple able
to aflford a rent of 4s. who left an old cottage for a
new one, attracted by the decency of having a third
bedroom, the possibility of lighting a fire upstairs
in case of illness, and the obvious convenience of
having a passage instead of being compelled to
walk straight from the road into the one living-
room. After three years* experience of it the wife
told me : ** As for the cold, I never felt anything

266 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

like it in all my life, and in the summer I simply
dread to have to light a fire. The old cottages are
far healthier in that kind of way, and Td rather
be back in one if only anyone would spend some-
thing on it, but they won't. Look at that cottage
over there, six people living in it, and nothing
under the thatch any more than if it were a cow
shed, and the thatch sinking in on them and full
of holes. We shiver and bake where we are, but at
least the water doesn't come in from overhead."

Not only have the poor very little idea of the
duty or possibility of preventing ill-health, but
they know nothing of repairing it. In no way
does their excessive passivity and endurance show
itself more clearly than in their treatment of sick
persons, especially of chronic cases. As a rule,
they are exceedingly kind to the sufferers, patient,
self-devoted to the last degree, but their whole
attitude of mind is fatalistic. They do not seek to
know the cause of the illness in order that they or
others may learn any lesson from it, and they do
not strive for the recovery to such a degree of
health as is demonstrably withiu reach. As a
consequence, many persons are completely bed-
ridden and utterly helpless who need only have
been partially crippled if more active and intelligent
efforts had been made from the beginning, and
others who might have been almost normal persons

THE ART OF REPAIRING 267

are semi-invalids. They lack hope in these cases,
and therefore lack the chief spring of successful
endeavour.

Respectable wage-earners often note real or
fancied defects in the system of elementary edu-
cation, but do they make any serious attempts to
repair these defects ? Does the father who declares
that his son in the seventh standard cannot write out
the simplest bill for him correctly, either teach him
how to do it or make his grievance heard in the
right direction ? Even the mother who tells me :
" I don't want my children learnt jography 'n 'istry.
I want 'em learnt to say, * Thank you, ma'am,' and
* Yes, please, sir.' That's what'U get 'em on in the
world," does she ever remember that the school
hours scarcely amount to twenty -four in the course
of seven days, and that as she is relieved of all
the less important branches of instruction, she has
ample time to instil good manners ?

Even the art of repairing their clothes is by no
means generally practised among the poor, and it
certainly might be more carefully taught and
inculcated at school than is at present the case.
One rarely meets a child on some part of whose
costume it might iTot be practised with advantage.
Sewing should be taught to boys when they are
too young to imagine that it is an indignity ; later
on, in the years when they have lost a mother's

1

268 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

care and not yet gained a wife's, they will only be
too thankful for the knowledge. Sailors do a great
deal to undermine the idea that rags are more
manly than the use of a needle and cotton, but I
was a little taken aback one day when I heard a
wife ask her husband, " Have you sewn those two
buttons on your brown waistcoat? That's right.
I do hate to see an untidy man ! " Two winters
ago a fine young seaman came back to his native
village for a fortnight's leave, and made a deep im-
pression on all the lads in the place by cutting out
and putting together a complete sailor suit for his
youngest brother and what was called " a trowsis "
for the next above him. Unfortunately for the
continued education of his admirers, he was recalled
to his ship before the second costume was finished.
He even found one imitator, and although the
results would not have passed muster at any
inspection, the lad who wore the suit was kept
warm and tidy as long as it lasted. Thousands of
mothers and married sisters and aunts tell the
school children who have been laboriously learning
to " cut out " that it is cheaper to buy ready-made
clothes. The time will undoubtedly come when
fewer and fewer garments are made at home, or
even made to order, but the necessity for mending
will exist as long as matter has a tendency to
change its form.

THE ART OF REPAIRING 269

Still less is the art of repairing household
furniture commonly practised by the poor. I
never fully grasped how much of the squalor and
discomfort that one sees among them is superficial
and easily removable until on one occasion with
an expenditure of 5s., nearly half of which
went to pay for the labour of an intelligent
child just above school age, I was able to turn a
room not fit for any human being into a bright
and pleasant one for a chronic invalid. Among
other details, I recall that the chimney was cured
of smoking, and a Hinckes-Bird ventilator was
fixed in the window ; the waUs were colour-washed,
and the pictures cleaned and re-hung ; the floor was
scrubbed and stained, and a torn and filthy carpet
was washed, ripped, and re-bound in separate strips ;
the bed was disinfected and the stuffing of the
mattress burnt and replaced by oat chaff, while a
pennyworth of glue and the loan of a few tools
turned some worthless lumber into serviceable
chairs and tables, and a cupboard with shelves
was contrived out of a few old orange boxes.

From the innumerable classes held to teach boys
carpentering, carving, etc., great good would arise
if they were taught these arts mainly with the
laudable object of improving the comfort and
beauty of their own homes, and not with a view to
9^ semi-charitable sale at the end of the session,

270 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

which brings a few shillings to some and a wholly
disproportionate sense of disappointment to others.
It is pitiable to see a winter s work result in what
a lad has been taught to call a panel or a medallion,
but which his mother terms " a loose bit of wood."
If carving is taught, it should be applied to some
chair or table or stool that the lads already possess ;
and if carpentry or joinery, it should be the
complete manufacture of some article suited for
their own homes. As to the fretwork on which
so many neat-handed boys are encouraged to waste
their time, I would gladly see every scrap in
existence used for firewood.

If we could but once understand that the poor
are remarkably like ourselves, we should have more
faith in trying to inspire them with the spirit of
self-help than in endeavouring to bear whichever
of their burdens they seem specially inclined to let
drop. (An old-established metaphor which reminds
me of a patient who exclaimed, " Bear my burden !
That would be easy enough. It's the hundreds of
parcels I complain of.") Are there any wage-
earners, any bad husbands, wives, parents, or
children, are there even any professional un-
employed whose conduct we cannot parallel among
ourselves and our acquaintances ? Once recognising
this elementary fact, we shall not venture to treat
them as if thfey were at once so much better and

THE ART OF REPAIRING 271

so much worse, so much more fooUsh and yet
stronger-headed than ourselves. We act as if they
are mentally incapable of learning the lessons
taught by hunger, privation, and family affection,
and yet have no fear that they will learn im-
providence, laziness, and indifference to duty if the
State bestows its most favourable attention upon
the unemployed, the neglected child, the deserted
wife, the homeless tramp. Only too frequently we
take the little that he hath from the man with a
decent standard of life and bestow it upon him
that hath none, with even more disastrous results
than if we schemed to benefit the rich. As
sweeping reforms cannot well be carried out every
six months or so, we should be in a better position
if the art of keeping all hiiman institutions in
moral and intellectual repair were more generally
and seriously studied.

XIII

Wasted Effort among the Poor

Brought into close acquaintance with the
exhausting physical drudgery of life on the one
hand, and its mental toil and stress on the other,
the district nurse learns that there is a curse in
labour as well as a blessing, and acquires an active
hatred of all waste effort of mind or body.

All detailed attempts to economise physical
exertion are of very modern origin. We have
only to observe the houses and furniture designed
for the upper classes within the last fifty or sixty
years in order to realise that the cost of labour to
the human being was less considered formerly than
it is now.

No piece of legislation ever accomplished has
cost as much labour to carry out as the various
Elementary Education Acts. On the whole, the
children of the poor have been very greatly
benefited, but the results nevertheless bear but a
small proportion to the efforts put forth, especially

WASTED EFFORT AMONG THE POOR 273

to the heroic struggles of school teachers trying
to carry out the regulations even when in direct
opposition to all the laws of ordinary mental and
physical development and to some of the most
unalterable conditions of working-class lives. The
teaching of the teachers and the choice of the
instruction given and received by them have been
left far too much in the hands of men, and too
many of them are men themselves, especially
considering that an enormously large proportion of
their pupils will be girls and children under ten
years of age.

In the upper classes it is generally acknowledged
that the longer young boys remain in the hands of
competent governesses the better position they
win and maintain at school, and also that it is
sheer waste of time for girls of less than sixteen or
seventeen to be taught any subject whatever by a
master.

All the more intelligent and open-minded ele-
mentary school teachers must in course of time
accumulate valuable experience, and form some
ideas as to the right order and succession as well
as the method of placing the various branches of
knowledge before the infant mind, but they are
bound hard and fast by an intricate mesh of rules.
A most zealous village schoolmistress, responsible

for some sixty girls and boys, complained to me :
18

274 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

" I always have to teach with my eye on the clock.
If I were to spend an extra ten minutes explaining
a matter which for some reason not understood by
grown-up minds is peculiarly difficult to children^
and then cut ten minutes from some senseless
routine that the stupidest child can follow when it
is half asleep, it would be a most serious breach of
the regulations. After twenty-five years' experience,
no more discretion is allowed to me than if I were
a pupil teacher, and I dare not take it."

I was always at a loss to understand how
many years average Board-school children took to
learn to read, how unintelligently they read, and
how little, interest they felt in the art ; but one
day I came across a book " specially prepared" to
combat the fact that infants of a certain age were
expected to meet and conquer any monosyllable in
the language, and it incidentally threw a clear light
upon the problem. I do not say that the book
was ever licensed by the authorities, and I under-
stand that its use has now been strictly forbidden,
but daily drilling in long lists of totally uncon-
nected words, such as plumb, jamb, apse, aisle,
weight, flange, niche, reign, guile, ledge, must have
been stupefying in the extreme.

Most of the many hours devoted to arithmetic
before the age of ten are utterly wasted, and at no
age is the instruction sufl&ciently practical. I have

WASTED EFFORT AMONG THE POOR 275

known girls of thirteen or fourteen who could
work long sums in vulgar fractions, but could not
say, even when given ample time for reflection, how
much a penny a week would amount to in a year,
nor work any of the simple problems that a child
of seven or eight, unable to write figures, ought to
be able to solve mentally with ease and pleasure.
In different parts of England I have asked boys
and girls of from twelve to eighteen to use a pair
of scales, and unless they had relatives engaged in '
retail trade they were totally unable' to do it or to
connect the pounds and ounces of school routine
with the pieces of brass and iron in front of them.
With a yard-measure or a foot-rule most of them
are equally at a loss. Geography seems to be
taught in much the same fashion. A girl of
thirteen drew me a map of India from memory,
marking the principal physical features with a fair
amount of accuracy ; but when I asked her how she
would go from London to Northampton, where her
grandparents lived, and whether she might expect
to pass Liverpool or Portsmouth on the way, she
could only gape ; and although she must have
repeated many hundreds of times, " England is an
island,'* she had by no means grasped the fact that
she would have to cross the water in order to reach
France.

More women, especially married women who

276 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

have brought up a famUy of children on smaU
means, ought to be in a position of authority with
regard to elementary education. Then there would
soon cease to be hard-and-fast rules, bearing equally
on the mother who keeps her child away from
school "to put money on a horse," or to "go
coaling " {i.e. to follow up coal carts and pick and
steal), or to visit the pawnshop, and the mother
who occasionally keeps her twelve or thirteen years
old daughter at home to instruct her in household
duties. There would also be an end of all com-
pulsory afternoon attendances of infants, and in
bad weather liberal concessions would be made
with regard to all children under eight. I knew
an over-busy village schoolmaster who used to
worry the mothers to send their children to him
as soon as they could walk, although few of them
would otherwise have attended until they were
four, and five was a more generally approved of
age, while some of the superior cottagers tried their
best to postpone the attendance until six. When
argument failed, he would ofier the inducement :
" If you will only let them come, I will not enter
them at present on the register, and then you can
keep them away on rainy days, and no questions
will be asked."

Last winter a village school and Sunday school
were closed for two months owing to an outbreak

WASTED EFFORT AMONG THE POOR 277

of diphtheria. Some parents turned their children
into drudges, and most allowed them to run wild
from morning till night, not even dressing them
properly on Sundays ; but one of the best mothers
told me, with the deepest satisfaction : " Since the
school was shut up Fve got Gertie and Mary [aged
11^ and 13 J] so nicely into work. I mean Mary to
go to work directly she's fourteen, and service isn't
the place to be learnt to work; girls had ought
to know how before ever they leave their home,
and to be in the way of it, and to keep right on at
it till it's finished. I get them up early in the
morning, and they each have their share to do.
Of course I let them play when it's done, and they
enjoy it far more than if they had all the day to
their selves."

A London woman, mother of several daughters
who all went to service, told me that she found it
practically impossible to get them to do any house
work while at school. Her plan was to let them
leave at fourteen, and she sat down for six months
and made them do the cleaning and cooking while
she sewed. She found it necessary to forbid any
"going out to play," and they had to grow up
suddenly. It was a rigorous system, and some-
times reinforced by the copper-stick, but it was
crowned with success.

We spend a great deal of breath and money in

278 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

advocating thrift, and then build " model" dwell-
ings without a single cupboard or a larder where
food can be kept in a wholesome condition from
one day to another, and with kitchen stoves that
must not only be seen but wrestled with before
either their extravagance or their temper- wearing
qualities can be realised. I was telling one of the
most economical women I have ever met, mother
of a Council-school teacher and a trained servant,
that I never allowed a dust-bin on my premises,
and she said regretfully, " I have such a mis'ble
poor stove that I can't save coal by burning the
rubbish. Do what I may, it will only burn the
best fuel."

Few but district nurses can estimate the amount
of waste eflFort there is among the poor with regard
to sick nursing and the care of young children,
most of it arising from a mixture of ignorance and
good-will. If there are two ways of doing a thing,
the more laborious will almost certainly be chosen.
The general course with regard to illness appears
to be first neglect, then intemperate zeal, then
slackness resulting from over-fatigue, then alarm
and fresh excitement and exertion of such a
wearing nature that I fully entered into the
diflficulties of a young nurse who told me how on
arriving at one house she was quite unable to
decide which was the person she had been called

WASTED EFFORT AMONG THE POOR 279

in to attend. "There were five haggard-looking
people in the room, and I was afraid to ask which
it was. I temporised a little, and when I dis-
covered a sixth person in bed, I thought I could
not be wrong in fixing on her as the invalid, but
this was a tactless blunder. My patient was
slightly less ill than the others, and had in fact
" got up from her bed to keep things going."

The poor generally are accused of laziness, but
it is rather mental than physical. "Nous avons
plus de paresse dans Tesprit que dans le corps,"
said La Rochefoucauld, and the text is of wide
application. The working classes will make more
rapid progress when they have learnt to set a higher
price upon coarse drudgery and monotonous routine.
Every district visitor knows how many chronic
invalids— old, young, and middle-aged— are to be
found in the homes of the respectable poor, and
with what inexhaustible indulgence and long-
practised skill most of them are treated, but few
persons indeed have any conception to what an
extent their present helpless condition was pre-
ventable in the early stages of the disease.

That prevention* is better than cure is what no
uneducated person can ever be made to believe.
Parents will heroically and uncomplainingly nurse
their elder children through typhoid fever and
(unh&ppily, with less success) their little ones with

28o FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

scarlatina and diphtheria, but it is utterly
impossible to get them to protest in due time
and in the right quarter against the disgraceful
sanitary accommodation at the workshop, or against
the known fact that several of their neighbours are
sending some of their children to school ^' to be out
of the way " of those who are already ill, nominally
with bad colds, but in reality with infectious
disorders of a serious nature. I can induce women
to scrub their sinks clean, and the poorest will
spend money on carbolic to smother the sickening
odour arising from the open pipe, but to get them
to understand the drainage and to see that the
trap exists and is kept in order is a different
matter. They wiU feed a cat, spending money on
milk and meat that they can ill aflford, but they
will not starve the mice out by securely shutting
up all food and keeping table and floor free from '
crumbs. When the fear is of rats, I have every
sympathy with this faith in cats.. I have known
many outwardly decent and well-kept dwellings
where without the cherished Tibby even grown
men would be attacked in their sleep, while
invalids and young children could not safely
be left alone at any hour of night or day.

Few mothers even believe in the literal " stitch
in time.'* It is far too much trouble to thread a
needle and mend a hole that is scarcely visible ;

WASTED EFFORT AMONG THE POOR 281

it is a mere matter of course to sit up a couple of
hours later than usual " making the poor child
decent for school" when the neglected tear has
become a rent threatening the very existence of
the garment.

A large proportion of our eflForts to improve
the condition of the poor are doomed to failure
just so long as we persist in devoting them
almost exclusively to the young, a course of action
which is like continually planting seeds without
the slightest reference to their immediate surround-
ings, or the smallest care for plants already rooted
and showing good promise of growth. No doubt it
would "be undesirable to throw further educational
burdens on the State, but this does not aflfect the
fact that nearly all private and voluntary attempts
at teaching are devoted to the young, and but
little interest is taken in the considerable numbers
of totally ignorant men and women who have the
will and the capacity to learn if even a tenth part
of the trouble were bestowed on them which is
lavished on heedless childhood. Wherever a real
teacher appears, adult pupils are always to be
found, though they may need much encouragement
at first. They have so often heard the recom-
mendation, "Learn while you're young," that
with pardonable want of logic they conclude that
it is impossible to learn at any other period, and

282 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

crush the inward desire for knowledge as an
untimely craving, heaving many a sigh over
'* having been took away from school just as I was
beginning to see the good of it." The belief that
one must learn young or not at all is so deeply
rooted that fairly intelligent women of forty, and
even considerably less, can with difficulty be
persuaded that it is possible for them to learn
more of cooking or fine laundry work or a new
branch of needlework. The exclusive care given
to the education of the young has an unpleasant
eflFect upon their character; with the natural
conceit of childhood, fostered by their untaught
parents' generous admiration of their little accom-
plishments, they incline to think their seniors not
merely ignorant but incapable. I remember a
little girl of ten who was simply astounded when
her mother, a woman of over fifty, after a single
lesson in knitting produced in two hours a strip as
good in quality and far larger in amount than the
children of her ** standard." Men are more easily
induced to believe in their latent powers and have
more leisure, but from a strictly domestic point of
view it is the continued education of the women
which is of most importance.

The waste efibrt due to lack of organisation
and regular intercourse between members of all
agencies intended to ameliorate the condition of

WASTED EFFORT AMONG THE POOR 283

the poor is simply incalculable. Philanthropists
call the poor and suffering their brothers, but
until they extend the same charity to all who are
working for the same cause, time and money
must alike be squandered. My personal ex-
perience has lain chiefly among the waste caused
by lack of close co-ordination among medical
charities. As a ward sister I wondered, power-
lessly, what became of the man whose leg had been
badly broken only three weeks previously when
he was discharged to make room for a more
urgent — or more " interesting " — case, or of the
incurable sufferer gently persuaded that he would
be " more comfortable at home." I recollect one
raw December day when a homeless man was
discharged. He had barely recovered from
pneumonia, and when his clothes were brought
him, dry and discoloured from the high tempera-
ture to which it had been a crying necessity to
subject them, I saw that they were hardly suffi-
cient even for a man in sound health. There was
nothing in my store cupboard but women's shawls
and children's shoes, and I appealed to the house
surgeon, a most zealous worker, to give me an old
coat. I had never known a professional man
who would not part with one — under pressure.
His eyebrows went in one direction, the corners
of his mouth in another. ** I'd do it gladly, sister,

284 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

but the fact is that this/' glancing at the coat
he was wearing, *' is the only one I possess. You
know I don't get anything here but the run of
my teeth, and it's rather a drain on my people.
They expected me to find paying work at once."

Of course the patient ought to have been com-
pelled to enter the workhouse until his health was
restored, and equally of course there was no one
empowered to put any pressure on him. He
wandered listlessly into the foggy, frozen streets,
and we saw him no more. The dressings alone
for his successor, at wholesale rates, cost 10s.
a day, and most of us knew that they might
have been applied to the iron bars of the bed
with as reasonable a hope of afiecting their com-
position as that of his poisoned body.

As a district nurse I learnt what becomes of
some of the discharged patients. One of my
earliest experiences was of finding a woman
paralysed, speechless, with frightful bedsores,
returned at a few hours* notice to a home where
the only person to receive her was the husband
whose brutality was said to have caused the
illness, and who, in any case, was a rough, ignor-
ant labourer, and absent from the house for at least
ten hours a day.

Expensive mechanical supports are provided for
children ; who sees that these patients have nourish-

WASTED EFFORT AMONG THE POOR 285

ing food and suitable exercise, or that the ap-
pliances are regularly worn and lengthened or
otherwise altered as need arises? Spectacles are
given, but whose business is it to see that the
chUdren s sight is tested from time to time, and
the glasses changed if necessary? Patients are
temporarily dismissed from the hospital where they
have been kept for many weeks at great expense,
with stringent orders to return after a fixed
interval or when a certain well-defined change
takes place. Who advises the friends on these
points ? I know an instance where a child's foot,
owing to a parental blunder, was left three months
immovably fixed in plaster of Paris, and per-
manent crippling of an acutely painful nature was
the result.

In educational matters we are beginning to
recognise the advantage of widespread organisa-
tion, but in our charitable undertakings we are
still irresponsible and jealous amateurs, and
unbridled individualists. "Egoism forbids co-
operation," says a Japanese moralist, ** and with-
out co-operation no great achievement is possible."
People love to speculate in charity as in other
things, and are always hoping that their chance-
directed sixpence will save a body, or at least a
soul.

Few wrongs done by the rich to the poor equal

286 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

the mischief caused by their dilettante charities.
When these are of a merely spasmodic and occa-
sional nature, the results are bad enough ; but they
can be resolutely stamped out like sparks which
might otherwise destroy half a parish. The real
mischief is done when, though entirely lacking
in "grace to persevere" and abandoning their
attempts long before they have learnt any serious
lessons from the resulting experience, they have,
nevertheless, so much sense of method and order
that their plans, instead of being abandoned, are
passed on to paid (possibly underpaid) hands,
and become in a most undesirable sense " a self-
reviving thing of power," able to draw subscriptions
from the entire kingdom, in addition to gifts from
colonial and American sympathisers. Doubtless
there are persons bom with the capacity for
active philanthropy just as others are born with
histrionic, literary, or artistic powers ; but while the
actor or the poet who disdains even the minimum
of study and training has to bear the personal
penalty of ridicule or neglect, the peripatetic
lover of his kind may not be even dimly con-
scious of the dismal harvest that the poor are
reaping from the far-flung wild oats of his daring
and obstinate inexperience.

Without a certificate of capacity we may not
teach the three E's to children of six years old, and

WASTED EFFORT AMONG THE POOR 287

almost every form of human activity is gradually
becoming hedged in by precautions and restrictions
designed to save the general public from rash and
ignorant tampering with their vital interests.
When shall we have a Licenser of Charities ? In
the meantime, how few of us could bear to face
the belief that some day we shall fall into the
relentless hands of Mrs. Be-done-by-as-you-did ;
that as Orphans we shall have to pace the streets
two and two, a hundred at a time, dressed in
yellow poke bonnets and low-strapped shoes, and
with our elbows glued to our ribs by scanty green-
checked dolmans ; or be exposed to soul-searing
publicity as Foundlings ; or fed on an unvarying
diet of soup and lukewarm suet pudding while
one of our subsidised parents lies in bed and the
other stupefies himself at the public-house; -or
that as child-emigrants we shall be robbed of home
and country at the age of ten ; or swept into
barracks and remembered — collectively — twice a
year, if we dare to be crippled or diseased without
the extenuating circumstance of a private income,
or of parents who would work day and night to
save us from such a death in life ; or endure any
other of the ill-considered schemes which, glowing
with fervent good-will, we have thrust upon the
weak and helpless ?

XIV

Remedies for Existing Evils

If one ventures to utter the word practical with
reference to any proposed remedy for an existing
evil, the prejudice is instantly aroused' that some
short-sighted, hand-to-mouth method is designed
which will inevitably result in creating infinitely
more misery than it relieves. If, on the other
hand, it ii possible to protest, "Pure theory 1"
one's schemes are rejected as visionary.

This is mere playing with words. No remedy
is really practical unless it aims at prevention. It
is impossible to prevent an evil without knowing
its cause or causes, and no analysis of causes which
omits known tendencies of the nonnal human
mind has been carried far enough.

At the present day some of the greatest evils
among the poorest classes are the low- level of
general health, the loss of presumably valuable
infant life and of adults while the full responsibility

of parenthood is still resting on them, the injury

288

REMEDIES FOR EXISTING EVILS 289

done to large numbers of children and young
people by the ignorant treatment they receive
and the general lack of rational home discipline ;
bad housing, the existence of many thousands of
unemployed or very irregularly employed men,
and the wretchedly inadequate pay of most working
women and girls.

Take any one of these evils and examine into
its causes, and we are inevitably led back to things
of the mind.

Why do men become tramps, for instance?
There is a popular idea that they find the life
enjoyable. I lived for eight years on a high road
swarming with them, and, as far as my eyesight
could reach, I distinguished the sullen, hopeless
gait of a genuine tramp, the more footsore and
irregular one of the traveller, from that of even
the most fatigued and dispirited day labourer re-
turning to the least satisfactory of homes. Omit-
ting cases of exceptional misfortune (and even
these are usually combined with some grave lack
of judgment), men generally become tramps because'
they are below the average in intellect, or because
of too early and complete emancipation from home
and school discipline, or because of their own and
their parents' short-sightedness.

How is it possible to pay women such wretched
wages? Because they have to compete against
19

290 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

married women and against girls partly supported
by their parents, and these compete against them
to the detriment of themselves, their children, their
homes, and ultimately of their fathers, husbands,
and brothers, because they do not understand
what they are doing. And the thoughtless rich
add not inconsiderably to the severity of the
competition. Some years ago, a draper in a wealthy
suburb showed me a beaded trimming, most of
which he said was made for him locally at three-
pence a yard. Knowing fairly well the length of
time that the work would take, I asked how he
thought it possible for anyone to live on such a
pittance. The explanation was worthy of a comic
opera : " Oh, ladies do a great part of it, and give
the money in charity.'* Another cause, also a
mental one, for the low wages of women is the
unchecked unwillingness of girls to submit to the
discipline and temporary sacrifice of learning a
skilled trade.

Children are destroyed, maimed, enfeebled in
mind and body for lack of proper food, clothing,
cleanliness, and house-room. Is poverty the only, or
even chief, cause ? In a large proportion of cases
they are simply suflFering from unsuitable food and
clothing ; the amount of money spent on both was
ample, but misdirected. Many children have died
from cold, or contracted diseases which will handicap

REMEDIES FOR EXISTING EVILS 291

them as long as they live, who wore plush coats and
feathered hats and lace collars and kid boots ; and
many more have had their health undermined by
bad feeding, whose food, nevertheless, cost double
what would have been necessary to provide plain,
wholesome, and sufficiently appetising and varied
nourishment. I knew three young mothers in a
country village who were all unable to nurse their
children, boys between five and eight months old.
The first gave her child twelve ounces of milk, cost-
ing a fraction over a halfpenny a day, and was scru-
pulously careful as to its quality and temperature.
The second bought a patent food at a cost of three
and twopence a week, mixing it to a paste with water.
The third had milk " by the quart," and fed the
baby whenever it cried. Number one thrived ;
number two was pining away when his father lost
his work for a couple of months, and the bonny little
lad was saved by the unwilling and sorely lamented
economy of plain milk ; number three saved him-
self by refusing steadfastly to imbibe more than
about twice as much as he needed.

The housing of the poor is disgracefully bad, and
often the matter is beyond their individual control,
but have they any idea of the importance of
securing air and light and space in their dwellings ?
have they even been taught to make the best of
their homes as they are ? In many three-roomed

292 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

flats I find the largest and lightest room entirely
devoted to show, rarely opened except to be cleaned,
often locked for fear the children should enter it
even for five minates. If there is a well-lighted
front kitchen and a gloomy wash-house, intended
just as a place to perform the roughest and dirtiest
and noisiest part of the work, the whole family will
squeeze into the latter, and spend as much time
there as possible.

Nearly every evil that can be brought forward
arises from mistaken ideas, and persists on account
of their prevalence ; and every remedy worthy of
the name must aim at improving the individual,
raising his value as a social unit. People may not
receive all the good that they deserve, but in the
long-run no human institution can secure that they
shall have, and continue to have, more than they
are worth. If a woman is nervous, yielding,
anaemic, untrained, feeble in mind and body, she
can earn very little, and will probably receive less
still ; if she marries, her labours as a wife and
mother will be poor in results for her family and
terribly costly for herself. If a man is below the
average in health, intellect, moral discipline, and
domestic sentiment, he is practically certain to fall
into the ranks of casual labour, and in more extreme
cases he will become a hopeless burden on the
community. Neither Conservatives, Radicals, nor

REMEDIES FOR EXISTING EVILS 293

Reactionists can prevent these things from happen-
ing. There is no political panacea : free trade, fair
trade, protection, retaliation, will not affect them.
Improve individuals, and the State which they
compose must also be improved ; but without this
mental and inward change every system of govern-
ment is more or less a failure. " The end which
statesmen should keep in view as higher than all
other ends is the formation of character," said
Spencer. Not only is this the highest end, but
the sole means by which the conditions of life can
be essentially and permanently improved.

Out of good bricks a substantial building can
be made, but if even one-twentieth of them be
crumbling and imperfect, no safe structure can be
raised, and the more elaborate the design the more
numerous the weak points must be.

In order to improve the individual we must
first ensure that he has been born uninjured and
vigorous, that he receives constant personal care
during the first twelve years of his life, and much
guidance, supervision, and control during the sub-
sequent eight or ten.

How can he obtain all this ? Not to any great
extent by Act of Parliament, or direct State inter-
ference of any kind, but chiefly by the improvement
of home life and the expansion of parental ideals.

Instead of asking ceaselessly for more legislation,

294 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

more collective powers, let us take stock of what
we have already, and ask to what extent we are
benefited by them. Instead of hastily bringing fresh
organisations into existence, and trusting blindly
to them for a quarter of a century, or else pulling
them up by the roots the day after to-morrow, let
us consider those already in activity, and find out
on the one hand whether we are checking the evil
or mistaken tendencies that lie hidden in all human
designs ; and, on the other hand, whether we are get-
ting the utmost possible amount of good out of them.
Take compulsory elementary education, for ex-
ample. In a very short time all children under
fourteen years of age will spend five days a week
for about nine and a half months a year at school.
Is the best practicable use made of the whole of
this period ? Do we not in many ways allow our-
selves to be hampered by the fact that when the
** codes " were first drawn up elementary education
commonly came to an end at ten or eleven ?
Average working-class children suffer not only
because their studies leave off too soon but because
they begin too soon, and are not graduated with
sufficient knowledge of the ordinary lines upon
which mental powers develop. The mentally
precocious child belongs almost exclusively to the
middle and professional classes ; the poor and the
rich develop more slowly. Much precious time is

REMEDIES FOR EXISTING EVILS 295

wasted in laboriously teaching pupils of seven or
eight things that would have been almost self-
evident to a child of eleven whose intelligence had
been occupied in the meantime with matters far
niore easily grasped. The same mistake was
formerly made with the children of the rich. Boys
of six and even five were tormented with Latin
grammar, still younger girls cried and struggled
over music lessons, and at twelve they were easily
distanced in these subjects by pupils who had
studied them for a few months. Needless to say,
the brains of the successful competitors had not
been allowed to lie entirely fallow, or left a prey to
dreams and whimsies, but they had been employed
chiefly on matters where memory counts for a great
deal, and their intelligence had been exercised but
not strained; above all, they had never become
accustomed to work in a fog. In all codes and
regulations affecting national education far too
much weight has been allowed to the opinion of
men belonging entirely to the professional class,
knowing no children but those of their own class
— and very little even of those during the first half
or even two-thirds of their childhood. The exten-
sion of the system of continuation schools is much
to be desired. They are needed not merely for
the purpose of teaching new and more advanced
subjects, but to prevent what has already been

296 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

learnt from being forgotten. It is possible to teach
moderately intelligent children a very great deal of
what is necessary for their welfare and advance-
ment, but it is not possible to make them remember
all this, nor even to ensure the remembrance of
what may be considered an irreducible minimum
of instruction, if they leave school at the age of
thirteen or fourteen, and divide their time hence-
forth between physical drudgery and complete
idleness spent in entirely unintellectual surround-
ings. Moreover, many of the most ignorant among
the poor are persons who were not naturally
defective but of retarded development, and
education carried over a longer period would
have made all the diflference in the world to
them.

Everywhere one finds parents willing and even
anxious to keep clever, quick-witted children at
school, but few of them " see the use of*' prolonged
teaching for the dullards. What would become of
many middle-class children, especially boys, if all
direct instruction ceased at fourteen or even earlier ?
I will not say that all opportunity of learning
comes to an end in childhood even among the
poorest, but bare " opportunity " is merely a handle
for genius, and has nevei^^been lacking under any
system of social life.

What we need is that rank-and-file brains should

REMEDIES FOR EXISTING EVILS 297

meet with a proper amount of care and considera-
tion. Even if raising the common school standard
meant the loss of a genius here and there for the
want of special fostering, would it matter very
much when we had so greatly reduced the need for
giants in the land ? All the truly great men of
the world are chiefly occupied in fighting the
battles of those who have been allowed to remain
below what is a safe or pleasant position for human
beings to occupy.

One reason why compulsory education has not
worked as great a reform as it might have done in
over thirty years is because the majority of the
teachers are insufficiently acquainted with the daily
lives of the ordinary pupils. Most of them come
from the aristocracy of the poor and have lived in
the extremest retirement and isolation. Neither
from early personal experience nor by sympathetic
study do they know the principal class with which
they have to deal.

Another reason for comparative failure is that
the moral origin of a large amount of stupidity is
not sufficiently recognised at the present day. Old
schoolmasters who declared that memory and
understanding waited upon attention, and that
attention was within the power of all their pupils,
were not so far from the truth as modern teachers
seem to think. To satisfy oneself of the insufficient

298 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

moral teaching assimilated (even if given), it is only
necessary to informally examine twenty or more
Council-school children by telling them soipe story
of daily life and asking their opinion as to whether
the actors were right or wrong, or lay an imaginary
case before them and inquire what they themselves
would think it their duty to do in such circum-
stances. Not only will fully half of the children be
unable to reply correctly, but those who give right
answers will probably supply ludicrously wrong or
inadequate reasons for their decision — this last a
matter of no immediate moment, but which must
become of practical importance as soon as other
and perhaps quicker- witted children look to them
for guidance.

Very often it is not more instruction that the
poor require, but some motive for action. It
is rare indeed to find persons of any age, or
any position in life, who make a practical use of
all their knowledge. If we look back with any-
thing like clear memory to our own childhood,
we shall acknowledge that there was a great gap
between knowledge and action, between believing
a dogma and doing anything because we believed
it. It is in order to bridge this gap that personal
influence may be of so much value and that re-
ligious teaching is in the fullest sense practical.

In the worst neighbourhood I ever visited.

REMEDIES FOR EXISTING EVILS 299

several women on separate occasions told me in
almost precisely the same words : " Ah, there's
many a thing done here that wouldn't be done
if the clergy came among us more." But visit
among them was exactly what the clergy would
not do. It is almost incredible, but to get dying
patients visited by the ministers whom they
earnestly desired to see was often more than I
could accomplish. They preferred multiplying
services. Services of whom? As a differently
minded priest remarked, "If the church bells
are always ringing, and their coat tails flying
round the comers to be there in time, they think
they have done their duty by the parish." And
another, exalting the duty of parochial visiting
above that of holding week-day services in empty
churches, said, "Unless I know my parishioners
when they are well, how can I expect them ^to
care to see me when they are ill? And if my
opinion is not worth having on the points of pigs
and cabbages, how can I expect to have it accepted
with regard to the education of their children ? "
I remember a large and elaborately decorated
church in a parish containing two thousand villa
residents and their servants, about one hundred
smaU shopkeepers and their families, and about
fifteen hundred of the labouring classes, nearly half
of whom were very poor. A daily service was

300 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

held at that church, but in order to ensure the
attendance of even three persons, a coterie of some
twenty ladies took it in turns to go. One day
an outsider, too rheumatic to attend a prolonged
service, entered the church, and although it was
several minutes past the appointed hour, found
no one present but the vicar. Just as he came
out from the vestry and knelt down she discovered
that she had forgotten her spectacles, and although
she knew she could repeat the responses by heart,
she was seized with a nervous panic when she
recollected that she would be expected to read
alternate verses of the psalms. Also, she was
a clergyman's daughter, and, as she expressed it
frankly, " I knew what a rage my father would
have been in if he had had to read matins for
one old person." Before the vicar rose to his feet
the congregation had fled. In the porch she
met one of the regular attendants just arriving,
and astounded her by the breathless question,
'* Can you read ? I can't. That's all right, then,"
and returned to her seat. In this same parish
a district visitor asked the vicar to call upon
a poor woman who anxiously waited to see him
and who was believed to be in a dying condition.
Four weeks after he met the district visitor.
"Oh, ah, Mrs. Wyvern, I — ah — ^lost the address
of that poor soul you mentioned. Is she — ah?"

REMEDIES FOR EXISTING EVILS 301

'* Much better, and gone to a convalescent home,"
was the pardonably impatient reply.

I once read that the poor in the country, at
any rate, can always have "air, water, and
the parson's advice." It seemed a scanty allow-
ance, but after living in certain rural districts
I came to the conclusion that in cottages these
are the things most often lacking. Inside the
houses there was no room for air, immediately
outside them it was poisoned, the nearest whole-
some water-supply was often half a mile away ;
and how frequently I longed to meet the masterful
landlord of fiction or the pragmatic parson and his
interfering wife !

If I told the vicar a few of the facts that
inevitably came to my knowledge : that gambling
of a ruinous kind was carried on in such and
such a house, or heavy secret drinking in another ;
if I told his wife that certain girls were old
enough for domestic service, and were becoming
anaemic from overcrowding, poor food, and idle-
ness, and that their mothers were willing to let
them go but not anxious, what happened?
Nothing — nothing at all.

In dealing with the most uneducated classes
the power and value, and indeed the mental
necessity, of constant repetition of one s teaching
cannot well be over-stated. Repetition is not, as

302 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

to more nervous and intellectual types, either
a weariness or a goad in the wrong direction.
It is soothing, and without it there is no such
thing as certainty. Not only is it valuable in
the mouth of doctor, nurse, minister, or whoever
may be the teacher, but it is specially impressive
if the same statements can be repeated by different
persons. For this reason co-operation between all
workers among the poor is imperative. When,
for example, I wished to induce the friends to
allow a consumptive patient to have sole possession
of one room, and to let her confine herself to
that room except when well enough to go out
of doors, I was usually told that it was un-
necessary or that it was impracticable. The
next step was to find the minister of the
denomination to which the sufferer belonged, and
induce him to repeat the advice; it was then
put into the mouths of district visitor, deaconess,
or church sister, and one of them was asked to
leave some simple leaflet on the subject of con-
sumption, or a magazine in which the matter
was incidentally treated ; finally, the " useful
neighbour," confidential friend and adviser of the
family was discovered and instructed.

After allowing time for all this, I returned to the
charge, and the victims of my innocent plot would
say, with a sigh of resignation, " Well, I suppose

REMEDIES FOR EXISTING EVILS 303

it had ought to be so. It's juss what the vicar bin

a-saying, and Miss B , and Mrs. Thomson from

over the way." After that, though many a con-
versational hill and dale had to be crossed, no real
difficulty remained.

To ameliorate the condition of the very poorest
and most ignorant it is not sufficient that we should
be armed with the principles of philosophers. We
need some of the methods of quacks : bold and clear
assertion, ceaseless and unblushing repetition.

On account of class feeling, the friendly neighbour
is always the most important ally, and there are
few depths of flattery to which I would not descend
in order to secure her vigorous co-operation. The
strength of class prejudice, not in the sense of
malignancy, but with regard to suspicion and dis-
trust, can only be realised by those who have spent
much time among the poor and are unwearied
listeners. The following is by no means an
extreme instance, although, as I knew all the
parties concerned, it struck me forcibly at the time.
A country lad of sixteen lived " with the gentry."
His mother had never been in service herself, but
she had received countless kindnesses from her
son's employers, and had much cause to know that
they were not only just and reasonable in their
treatment of dependents, but unusually kind and
considerate. Nevertheless, she listened to and

304 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

encouraged the most trivial and childish com-
plaints. His brother of fourteen, her favourite
child, took a situation at a small public-house,
and shared the room of an habitual drunkard who
lodged there. It was this man's duty to get up at
two o'clock every morning and do an hour's work
with a cart and horse. He was often too stupid
with drink to be roused, and, after vainly trying to
wake him, this mere child, who had been on duty
firom 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. or even 11, would go out
to the street and do it himself, " so's Jim shan't
lose his job." The mother knew all this, and never
stirred a finger to prevent it. " Hard work don't
never hurt 'em. It's the treatment I looks to,"
was her sole comment. Probably the intensity
and selfishness of class feeling is reduced of late
years in the same ratio as the brutality of its
outward expression. I have been told by a
gentleman farmer bom about the year 1830 that
as a lad he often heard and drank to the toast,
"Here's to a bloody war and a bad harvest."

Above all things, we must never lose sight of
the continuity of life. Apparently forgetting the
context, but with more desire to make a sound
social use of religious teaching than is commonly
shown, someone asked me recently, " Is it because
St. Paul was a bachelor that he talked so lightly
of legislating ' for the present distress ' ? People

REMEDIES FOR EXISTING EVILS 305

with children and grandchildren cannot afford to
take short views."

No conceivable development of the philanthropic
spirit among the upper classes could affect the con-
dition of the poor to an extent comparable to the
revolution that would take place in their whole
method of thought and action if the spirit of
fatalism and blind submission, chequered by barren
revolt, were displaced by the intellectual ability to
trace cause and effect in even the simplest cases.
Many among the least educated show signs of
considerable intellectuality, but how deficient the
poor as a whole are, and are allowed to remain,
in the art of reasoning, only those intimately
acquainted with their mental processes can even
faintly realise. Grown men and women, after all
the education brought to them by fifty years of
life, have often in sad and sober earnestness offered
me " reasons " which if they came from a child of
seven or eight would probably.be met by the
reply, " Don't be so foolish ! " The power to turn
the attention to the essential points of the matter
in hand is generally defective or absent, and the
practical training of life often fails to supply it
owing to the lack of leading principles to which
experience may be referred. We hear of " using
your eyes," "keeping your wits about you," and

so forth, but as the artist, for one, knows very well,
20

3o6 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

people cannot see until they have been taught to
see. All through one winter I gave theoretical
instruction to two women (separately) who had had
practical knowledge of the matter for quite twenty
years before I had ever heard of it. At first when
I told them that this or that thing could be ob-
served in certain circumstances, they rarely failed
to assure me that " in all their born days " they
had never known it happen. Later on they told
me, with intense surprise, that these things " were
now beginning to happen," but the older and more
prejudiced of the two added firmly, " I'm sure the
like of it never come to me before."

Probably one of the best means of supplying the
poor with most necessary parts of education would
be direct taxation, and it is certainly one of the
most practical remedies for extravagant local ad-
ministration. In a thinly populated parish cover-
ing a large area a young girl said to me, " We'd
ought to have lamps in the village." "Do you
wish the rates to go up?" "Oh no; mother's
got lis. rates to pay at Lady Day as 'tis," and
she quickly mentioned a few things which, in her
mother's opinion, had been done in the parish
unnecessarily, or at an unreasonable cost. Another
cottager who paid 6s. for the entire year delivered
lectures to tramps if they knocked at her door.
Women farther down the hill paid rent, rates, and

REMEDIES FOR EXISTING EVILS 307

taxes all in one, without the faintest idea how
much they paid for each, and most of them en-
couraged tramps to the full extent of their ability.

Education can alone supply the remedies for all
existing evils, but the ruling classes have a double
duty with regard to the matter : first, to give an
education which is a real preparation for life ; and,
secondly, to avoid hasty interposition between the
stem experiences of life and those who have
strength and wit enough to profit by them. And
all school teachers would do well to recall Adam
Smith's dictum : " The great secret of education is
to direct vanity to proper objects."

Perhaps one of the greatest needs of the present
day is that working-women should receive decent
wages, and it would be well if all those desirous of
helping them began by accepting two elementary
facts and their implications: firstly, that women
will never receive good wages until they can earn
them ; and, secondly, that if they could earn them,
society as a whole would be enormously benefited.
Matrimony cannot support all women, still less can
it support all women at all periods of their life.
Working-class girls between seventeen and twenty-
four are practically bound to earn their own living,
and whether that living is liberal or intolerably
meagre is a question not only affecting themselves
but the children who will be born to them, and

3o8 FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW

it unmistakably affects the level of social morality
in one of its most important points. Young and
middle-aged widows will always abound, and al-
though among the poorer classes they commonly
marry again, there will certainly be an interval of
a year or more during which they must depend
upon their own exertions; and bad housing and
semi-starvation during that period will injure
either health or morals, or both. Even if the first
marriage lasts for thirty or more years, it must
still be remembered that the average wo^n lives
two years longer than the average man, and that
she is usually from one to five years younger than
her husband, while pensions from all sources and
even almshouse allowances generally cease at his
death, and outdoor relief is diminished by one half
instead of the third which would be reasonable,
considering that the same amount of rent must
still be paid. How are all these blank periods to
be filled in if a woman, at her best, has difl&culty
in earning eight or ten shillings a week in the
open market?

It is no hardship for a woman to earn her living
if she is properly prepared to do it; the real
burden is that in all classes of life it is so often a
case of bricks without straw, whether mental or
physical work be in question. Even when all that
is demanded of widow or spinster is that she should

REMEDIES FOR EXISTING EVILS 309

" look after what she has," how often have parents
and guardians forearmed her with the necessary
business knowledge? I remember hearing the
sympathetic wife of a wealthy man call on him
to pity certain women who had been ruined by
placing their father's savings in the hands of a
dishonest speculator. " Greedy old things, serve
'em right 1 " was his ultra-masculine reply. " They
must have known that the interest he oflfered them
could not be got honestly by people who had
nothing to contribute but their money. If you
can't work, and can't aflford to take a risk, and
haven't any brains, two and a half per cent, is a
fair price."

The victims certainly ought to have known this,
but did they know it ?

THE END

PrinUd 6y

MORRUON & OiBB LiMITXD

BdUiimrgh

BY THE SAME AUTHOR.

The Next Street But One.

Cheaper Edition (Fourth Impreeeion). Crown 8vo, 88. 6d.

The Spectator. — ^' Mies Loane is a district nurse ; she has
lived among the poor and for the poor ; she knows the society of
the poor from the inside, yet she comes in from the outside, con-
sequently she sees closely enough to descry details accurately.
There are no volumes of statistics, however precise, and no books
about poor relief, however true to history, which can teach us what
Miss Loane has learned. . . . Taken as a whole, we believe there is
to be found in * The Next Street But One ' and * The Queen's Poor '
more wisdom on the problems of poverty than in half the books on
political economy and sociology published within the present
generation. . . . We would not merely recommend, but would urge,
their attentive perusal upon all men and women who are concerned
with the question of poor relief, and who are sincerely anxious to
help the people without harming them. They will find in Miss
Loane's womanly common sense and robust humour an admirable
corrective to the pleas for sapping the strength of the nation which
are the evil fashion of the hour."

The Times. — "Miss Loane has written another delightful book.
. . . Her knowledge is real and extensive, her observation acute
and accurate, her sense of humour unfailing; and withal she is
never sentimental, though always sympathetic. She has a great
gift for telling stories. The last eleven chapters of the book consist
of short narratives, told with remarkable skill. . . . The earlier
chapters are devoted to various aspects of life among the poor,
under general headings — Culture, Home Lifp, Ethics, Courtship
and Marriage, etc. They have the same charm of reality, sincerity,
and unselfconscious art.''

LONDON: EDWARD ARNOLD.

1

BY THB SAME AUTHOR .

THE QUEEN'S POOR.

CfiBaper Edition {Second impression). Crown 8vo, Ss, 6d.

The Morning Po8t.~^'The author's experiences of district
noning, combined with an aptitude for observing character, have
enabled her to produce a book which is instructive, pathetic, or
diverting, according to the point of view, and doubtless many of
her readers will be alive to all three qualities."

The Daily News.— "A book which is not only a mine of
humorous stories, quaint sayings, and all that web of anecdote and
quick repartee which sweetens a life at the best limited and austere.
It is also a study in which common sense mingles with sympathy
in a record of intimate relationship with the problems of poverty."

The AthenSBum. — " Miss Loane has obvious qu^ifications for
a task which many have essayed, and few essayed successfully. . . .
The result is one of the most healthy, true, and satisfying pictures
of their standard of life and comfort, their outlook on this world
and a world beyond, which have recently been issued."

The Ghiajpdian.— "Miss Loane teaches those who are willing
to learn, what the poor suffer, what they think, and how we may
hope to help them. Her long experience as a district nurse enables
her to speak with authority, whUe her manifest gifts of sympathy
and common sense make it a privilege to learn from her."

The Chiiroh Times,—" This is a book which no one can
afford to neglect who works among the very poor, or who desires
to know the conditions under which they live, and the point of
view from which they regard various problems of life. ... A real
and solid, albeit informal, contribution to social and economic
knowledge.''

LONDON: EDWARD ARNOLD.

Telegrams : 4.1 and 43 Maddox Street,

• Scholarly, London.' Bond Street, London, W.,

/ Marcb^ 1908.

Mr. Edward Arnold's

List of New Books.

NEW NOVEL.

By the author of ' The Jungle.'

THE METROPOLIS.

By UPTON SINCLAIR.
Crown ivo. 6s.

This is Mr. Upton Sinclair's first new novel since * The Jungle,'
-wherein he startled the world with his lurid account of the iniquities
[perpetrated in the American canned meat trade.

In < The Metropolis ' he brings a scathing indictment against the
vulgar element in New York Society, whose exotic and vicious lives
are exposed with all that unrestrained and brilliant relentlessness of
which Mr. Sinclair is a master.

It will be remembered that a few months ago a report went round
to the effect that Mr. Sinclair had managed to get a situation as
butler in the house of a prominent millionaire, where he was studying
the occupants with the intention of describing them in a book. The
report was imfounded, and was denied at the time ; but it is quite
clear from this book that he must have had opportunities of no
ordinary character to have enabled him to handle the subject with
such telling and convincing effect.

LONDON : EDWARD ARNOLD. 41 & 43 MADDOX STREET, W.

2 Mr. Edward Arnold* s List of New Books

NEW NOVEL.

By the author of ' The House of Shadows.'

THE WAYS OF REBELLION.

By REGINALD FARRER.
Croum 8vo. 6s.

Mr. Farrer has gained for himself a reputation as a writer of no\
with fresh and original themes. In the present instance cert
phases of modem lue are hit off with great skill and incisivem
The vacillating relations of a young married lady with a man -v
has divested himself of his wealth in order to devote his life to sen
among the poor, are handled in a manner extremely modem. I
Farrer knows his world, and provides much crisp dialogue and cle
cut phraseology.

FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW.

By M. LOANE,

AoTHOK OP * Thb Next Strkbt but Onb,' ' Thb Qubbn's Pook,' etc.

Crown 8vo, 6s.

Miss Loane is a district nurse ; she has lived among the poor i
for the poor ; she knows the society of the poor from the inside,
she comes in from the outside, consequently she sees closely enoi
to descry details accurately.

This new book, full of real knowledge, common sense, and rob
humour, is urgently recommended to the attentive pemsal of all n
and women who are interested in the problem of life among
poor. The following are among topics discussed in it: 1
Manufacture of the Tramp, The Cost of Food, Mental and Mc
Characteristics, Why the Poor prefer Town Life, What is Charii
Miss Loane has a great gift for telling anecdotes, and employ;
with effect in the present instance.

NEW AND CHEAPER EDITION.

THE NEXT STREET BUT ONE.

By M. LOANE.
Crovm 8vo. 3s. 6d.

; Mr. Edward Arnolds List of New Books 3

i

bEORGE RIDDING, SCHOOLMASTER

AND BISHOP.

S'ottss'tbitb Dea5 Aaatet ot TIQlincbeBtet, t866~t884*
S'itBt JSlBbop ot Soutbwellt t884-t904.

By his Wife, Lady LAURA RIDDING.
0^ With Illustrations and a Plan, Demy 8vo. 15s. net.

Whilst appealing especially to Wykehamists, this valuable
Eind interesting biography claims tl^e attention of the larger public that
snjoys reading about the careers of successful and distinguished
people.

The volume is roughly divided into three sections, the first telling
Df Dr. Ridding's early days at Winchester and Oxford. After this
t^omes the account of his notable headmastership — notable because
during it was evolved the Winchester known to most of her sons
tiow living. So many buildings were added and so many improve-
txients made that Dr. Ridding, the prime mover in it all, came to be
jnown as *the second foimder.' The third section describes the
Tormation of the Diocese of Southwell, and is a remarkable revela-
:ion of the successful application of exceptional administrative
ability.

PICTORIAL ART IN THE FAR EAST.

By LAURENCE BINYON.

With Coloured Frontispiece and numerous other Illustrations beautifully
reproduced in collotype. Crown ^to. ais. net*

This important work, which is only rendered possible by the
mmense additions to our knowedge of Far Eastern art during the
ast decade, brings out and establishes the high interest of Chinese
Dainting, hitherto practically unknown in Europe, and of the older
schools of Japan, the subsidiary schools of India, Persia and Tibet
3eing also glanced at. The author's aim has been to treat his
mbject not merely from the technical historical side, but as a theme
)f living and universal interest, with its background of Oriental
bought and civilization.

4 Mr. Edward Arnold's List of New Books

MINES AND MINERALS OF THt

BRITISH EMPIRE.

3kln0 a Veactiptton of tbe f>totoricaI, pbfi0ical»' and Sn^ustn
#eatute0 of tbe principal Qenttee of Ainecal ptodoction
in tbe J9riti0b Dominione besonb tbe Seas.

By RALPH S. G. STOKES,

Latb Mining Eoitok, Rand Daily Mail^ Johannesburg, S.A.

D$My 890. With numerous Illustrations. 15s. net.

This work is the outcome of a careful and exhaustive inspect!
of the mines all over the Empire, covering a considerable period, ^
the part of the author, who has visited personally the places
describes, and who has brought much practical knowledge to hi .
upon his subject. A moment's consideration enables one to real .
the great amount of romance there is attached to this prosa :.]
sounding industry : the histories of some of the mines are capal '<
of filling volumes by themselves. On the other hand, the book i
indispensable as a work of reference for capitalists, investors, a if
many others interested in the different aspects of mining. i

TURKEY IN EUROPE.

By SIR CHARLES ELIOT, K.C.M.G.

(* Odysseus *).

A New EdUion^ with Additional Chapters on Events from 1869 to th

Present Day.

Large Crown ivo. 7s. 6d. net.

Although the identity of * Odysseus ' has for some time been
open secret, it is satisfactory to be able at length to reveal definil
the authorship of this important work. The additional chapl
contain a valuable review of the present position of the Turi
question, and bring up to date a book that is abready regarded a
standard authority on its subject.

Mr* Edward Arnold's List of New Books

BOOKS RECENTLY PUBLISHED.

FROM THE NIGER TO THE NILE.

By BOYD ALEXANDER.

LiBUTRNANT, RiFLB BRIGADE.

Two volumes. Large Medium 8vo, With Illustrations and Maps.

36s. net.

* This is a great book on a great subject. The expedition of which it tells
the story was by far the most remarkable feat of recent African travel, the
greatest feat of endurance since Mr. Grogan's memorable journey from the
Cape to Cairo, and more fruitful in scientific results than any expedition since
that of Stanley. Mr. Alexander modestly disclaims literary skill, but we know
few books of travel written in purer English.' — Spectator.

' It is a book which is worthy to be ranked with the classics of Stanley,
Speke, and Livingstone — a book that deserves to, and assuredly will, take rank as
one of the most fascinating revelations of savage Africa. We have seldom read a
better book of travel, never a more deeply interesting one.' — Country Life.

MEXICO OF THE TWENTIETH

CENTURY.

By PERCY F. MARTIN, F.R.G.S.,

Author op 'Through Fivb Republics op South America.'

Two volumes. Demy 8vo. With Illustrations and Map. 30s. net.

ACROSS PERSIA.

By E. CRAWSHAY WILLIAMS.
Demy Bvo. With lUtutrations and Maps. las. 6d. net.

RAILWAY ENTERPRISE IN CHINA.

Bn Bccount ot ita ^ridfn an^ development

By PERCY HORACE KENT.

Demy 8vo. With Maps, las. 6d. net.

Mr. Edward Arnold* $ List of New Books

MODERN STUDIES.

By OLIVER ELTON, M.A.,

Pkopbssor op English Litbratusb m thx Univbrsity ok Livekpoou

Large Crown 8vo. js. 6d. net.

MEMOIRS OF MISTRAL.

Rendered into English by CONSTANCE ELISABETH MAU]

Author op 'Wagner's Herobs,' 'An English Girl in Paris/ etc
Lyrics from the Provencal by ALMA STRETTELL (Mrs. LAWRENCE HARRISON

Dsmy 8vo. With Illustrations, las, 6d. net*

THE
GROWTH OF MODERN NATIONS.

B t)ldton? ot tbe particularldt S'orm of Socleti^.

Translated from the French of HENRI de TOURVILLE

by M. G. LOCH.

Demy 8vo. las. 6d. net.

AN INTRODUCTION TO CHILD

STUDY.

By W. B. DRUMMOND, M.B., CM., F.R.C.P.E.,

Author op ' The Child : His Nature and Nurture.'

Crown 8vo. 68. net.

THE CHILD'S MIND : ITS GROWTF

AND TRAINING.

By W. E. URWICK, M.A.

1

Crown Svo, 4s* 6d. net.