Not Guilty: A Defence of the Bottom Dog

Says Dr. Hall, of Leeds:

It matters but little whether a child be born and bred in a palace or a cottage – of pure pedigree or mongrel – if he does not receive a proper supply of bone-making food he will not make a good bony framework, which is the first essential of true physical well-being.

Amongst the poor it is a common thing for children to want food: not to have enough food. This is not the fault of the children, but is due to the poverty of their parents.

But it is common also amongst the poor for children to be fed upon improper food. Quite young infants, babies, indeed, are often fed upon salt fish, rancid bacon, impure milk. Cases are too numerous in which babies are given beer, gin, coarse and badly cooked meat, inferior bread, and tea.

This is not the fault of the children, but is due to the ignorance of their parents.

The results of such feeding, and of such starvation, are weakness, poorness of blood, deafness, sore eyes, defective intelligence, rickets, epilepsy, convulsions, consumption; degeneration and death.

Professor Cunningham says:

One point which is established beyond all question is the remarkable influence which environment and nurture exercise upon the development and growth of the child, as well as upon the standard of physical excellence attained by the adult According to the statistics supplied to the British Association Committee, children vary to the extent of 5 in. in stature, and adults to the extent of 3 1/2 in. in stature, according as the circumstances under which they are reared are favourable or otherwise.

Dr. R. J. Collie, M.D., speaking of the mentally defective children in the London Board Schools, says:

In a large number of instances, after the careful individual attention and mid-day dinner of the special schools, they are returned, after from six to eighteen months, to the elementary school with a new lease of mental vigour. These children are functionally mentally defective. Their brains are starved, and naturally fail to react to the ordinary methods of elementary teaching. In a certain proportion of the cases it is the result of semi-starvation.

The headmaster of a large school in London said to a Press representative:

Not 5 per cent, of my 400 boys know the taste of porridge. New bread, and margarine at fourpence per pound, with a scrap of fried fish and potatoes at irregular intervals, is responsible for their pinched, unhealthy appearance and their stunted growth.

Dr. Lydston, in The Diseases of Society, says:

The quantity, quality, and assimilation of food pabulum is the keynote of stability of tissue-building. With the source of the architect's own energy sapped by innutrition, and the materials brought to his hand made pernicious or defective in quality or insufficient in quantity, structural degeneracy must needs result. The importance of this as regards the brain is obvious. It bears directly upon the question of the relation of malnutrition to social pathology.

So much has been written and said of late about the evil effects of starvation and improper food upon the health and minds of children, and so much and such strong evidence has been put forward as to the seriousness and the prevalence of the evil, that I need not go more fully into the matter here.

Millions of children are ruined in body and mind, millions of degenerates are made by bad feeding or under-feeding.

And the good and the bad feeding are both part of our environment.

Poverty, Labor, and Overcrowding

As the health affects the brain, and the brain the morals, all healthy and unhealthy influences have a moral bearing.

Bad air, bad water, bad drainage, bad ventilation, damp and dark streets and houses, dirtiness and over-crowding, all tell against the health, against the health of children most seriously, and all help on the deadly progress of degeneration.

Greyness and monotony of life, unclean, unsightly, and sordid surroundings, tedious and soulless toil, all tend to blunt the senses, to cloud the mind, and to oppress the spirit.

Millions of the working poor, who live in great and noisy cities, whose neighbourhoods are vast, huddled masses of sunless streets and airless courts, whose lives are divided between joyless labour and joyless leisure; the conditions of whose comfortless and crowded homes are such as make cleanliness and decency and self-respect well nigh impossible: millions of men, women, and children are here starved in soul as well as in body.

These people, throughout their anxious and laborious lives, sleep in the overcrowded cottages and tenements, ride in the overcrowded and inconvenient third-class carriages, sit in the crowded and stifling galleries at the theatre, are regaled with crudest melodrama, the coarsest humour, the most vapid music. When they read they have the Yellow Press and the literature of crime. When they get to the seaside they spend their brief and rare holiday in the rowdiest of watering-places.

They have no taste for anything higher? True. They have never been taught to know the highest. And their ignorance, and their slums, and their clownish pleasures, are part of their environment We need not ask whether such environment makes for culture, for joy, for health.

They have no refinement in their lives, these poor working millions. They have no flowers, no trees, no fields, no streams; no books, no art, no healthy games.

Worse than that, perhaps, they are paid neither honour nor respect: they are without pride and ambition; they have no ideals, no hope.

The environment that denies to human beings all pride and honour and hope, all art and nature and beauty, does not make for health, nor for morality.

The straitness of means, the uncertainty of employment, the looming shadow of hunger and the workhouse, send some to suicide and some to crime, but leave the impress of their dreaded and evil presence upon the hearts and minds of nearly all.

We must remember that these poor creatures human. The difference between them and us is more a difference of environment than of heredity. The hunger for pleasure, for excitement and romance, is as strong in their soul as in ours. Like ourselves, they cannot live by bread alone. Excitement, pleasure of some kind, they must have, will have. The hog is contented to snore in his sty, the cat is happy with food and a place before the fire; but the human being needs food for the soul as well as for the body. And there is ample environment to feed the hunger of the ignorant and the poor for excitement: the environment of betting, and vice, and adulterated drink.

In the poor districts the drinking dens are planted thickly. There is money to be made. And they are blatant and frowsy places, and the drink is rubbish – or poison.

I have seen much of the poor. I could tell strange, pathetic histories of the slums, the mines, the factories: of the workhouses and the workhouse school, and the police-courts where the poor are unfairly tried and unjustly punished.

Let me dip back into some of my past work, and show a few pictures. Here is a rough sketch of the women in the East End slums:

WOMEN IN THE METROPOLIS OF THE WORLD

"Have you any reverence for womanhood? Are you men? If you come here and look upon these women, you shall feel a burning scorn for the blazoned lies of English chivalry and English piety and English Art.

"Drudging here in these vile stews day after day, night after night; always with the wolf on the poor doorstep gnashing his fangs for the clinging brood; always with the black future, like an ominous cloud casting its chill shadow on their anxious hearts; always with the mean walls hemming them in, and the mean tasks wearing them down, and the mean life paralysing their souls; often with brutal husbands to coax and wait upon and fear; often with loafing blackguards – our poor brothers – living on their earnings; with work scarce, with wages low, in vile surroundings, and with faint hopes ever narrowing, these London women face the unrelenting, never-ceasing tide of inglorious war.

"If you go there and look upon these women, you will feel suddenly stricken old. Look at their mean and meagre dress, look at their warped figures, their furrowed brows, their dim eyes. In how many cases are the poor features battered, and the poor skins bruised? What culture have these women ever known; what teaching have they had; what graces of life have come to them; what dowry of love, of joy, of fair imagination? As I went amongst them through the mud and rain, as I watched them plying their needles on slop-garments, slaving at the wash-tub, gossiping or bandying foul jests in their balcony cages, drinking at the bars with the men – the thought that rose up most distinctly in my mind was, 'What would these poor creatures do without the gin?'

"The gin – that hellish liquor which blurs the hideous picture of life, which stills the gnawing pain, which stays the crushing hand of despair, and blunts the grinding teeth of anguish when the child lies dead of the rickets, or the 'sticks' are sold for the rent, or the sweater has no more work to give, or the husband has beaten and kicked the weary flesh black and blue! What would they do, these women, were it not for the Devil's usury of peace – the gin?

"My companion took me to a bridge across a kind of dock, and told me it was known thereabouts as 'The Bridge of Sighs.' There is a constable there on fixed-point duty. Why? To prevent the women from committing suicide. The suicides were so numerous, he said, that special precautions had to be taken. And since the constable has been set there, so eager are the women to quit this best of all possible worlds that they have been known to come there at night with a couple of women friends, and to leap into the deep, still water while those friends engaged the constable in conversation.

"Do you understand it? The woman has been wronged until she can endure no more; she has sunk till she can struggle no longer; she has been beaten and degraded until she loathes her life – even gin has ceased to buy a respite; or she is too poor to pay for gin, and she drags her broken soul and worn-out body to the Bridge of Sighs, and her friends come down to help her to escape from the misery which is too great for flesh and blood to bear. It is a pretty picture, is it not? While our sweet ladies are sighing in the West End theatre over the imaginary sorrows of a Manon Lescaut or repeating at church, with genteel reserve, the prayer for 'all weak women and young children' – here to the Bridge of Sighs comes the battered drudge, to seek for death as for a hidden treasure, and rejoice exceedingly because she has found a grave."

Many of these poor women, perhaps most, are mothers. What kind of environment, what land of stamina can they give their children?

"Take care of the women, and the nation will take care of itself." Here is another sketch from the life, taken in the chain and nail-making districts of Staffordshire.

BRITONS NEVER, NEVER, SHALL

"In the chain shops of the Black Country the white man's burden presses sore. It presses upon the women and the children with crushing weight. It racks and shatters and ruptures the strongest men; it bows and twists and disfigures the comeliest women, and it makes of the little children such premature ruins that one can hardly look upon them without tears or think of them without anger and indignation.

"At Cradley I saw a white-haired old woman carrying half a hundredweight of chain to the fogger's round her shoulders; at Cradley I saw women making chain with babies sucking at their breasts; at Cradley I spoke to a married couple who had worked 120 hours in one week and had earned 18s. By their united labour; at Cradley I saw heavy-chain strikers who were worn-out old men at thirty-five; at Cradley I found women on strike for a price which would enable them to earn twopence an hour by dint of labour which is to work what the Battle of Inkerman was to a Bank Holiday review. At Cradley the men and the women are literally being worked to death for a living that no gentleman would offer his dogs."

Thence to the domestic workshops. Old women, young girls, wives and mothers working as if for dear life. Little children, unkempt and woebegone, crouching amongst the cinders. No time for nursing or housewifery in the chain trade. These women earned from 6s. to 9s. a week. Some of them are, I see, in an advanced state of pregnancy.

And what pleasures have these people: what culture and beauty in their lives? This:

"Were they ever so anxious to 'improve their minds,' what leisure have they, what opportunity? Their lives are all swelter and sleep. Their town a squalid, hideous place, ill-lighted and unpaved – the paths and roads heel-deep in mire. Their houses are not homes – they have neither comfort nor beauty, but are mere shelters and sleeping-pens.

"In all the place there is no news-room nor free library, nor even a concert-hall or gymnasium. There is no cricket-ground, no assembly-room, no public bath, no public park, nor public garden. Throughout all that sordid, dolorous region I saw not so much as one tree, or flower-bed, or fountain. Nothing bright or fair on which to rest the eye.

"But there are public-houses. And in several of them I tasted the liquor, and spilled it on the floor."

Of how many towns and villages in Europe and America might the same be said?