Chapter I: HAVE so often insisted that East London must be regarded as a city of (2)

May-day is gone. Its place is taken, and more than taken, by Easter Monday. It is the fourth and last day of the longest holiday in the whole year. From Good Friday to Monday, both inclusive, no work is done, no workshops are opened. The first day, the Day of Tenebræ, the day of fasting and humiliation, is observed by East London as a day of great joy; it is a day on which the men seek their amusements without the women; on this day there are sports, with wrestling and boxing, with foot-ball and athletics; the women, I think, mostly stay at home. On the Saturday little is done but to rest, yet there are railway excursions; many places of amusement, such as the Crystal Palace and the Aquarium (they offer a long round of shows lasting all through the day), are open. Easter Sunday is exactly like any other Sunday. But Monday—Monday is the holiday for all alike, men, women, and children. Poor and miserable must that man be who cannot find something for Easter Monday.

There used to be the Epping Hunt. This absurd burlesque of a hunt was the last survival of the right claimed by the citizens of London to hunt in the forests of Middlesex. On Easter Monday the “hunt” assembled; it consisted of many hundreds of gallant huntsmen mounted on animals of every description, including the common donkey; there were also hundreds of vehicles of every kind bringing people out to see the hunting of the stag. It was a real stag and a real hunt. That is to say, the stag was brought in a cart and turned out, the horsemen forming an avenue for him to run, while the hounds waited for him. There was a plunge, a shout; the stag broke through the horsemen and ran off into the cover of the forest, followed by the whole mob at full gallop; the hounds seem to have been for the most part behind the horses, which was certainly safer for them. The stag was not killed, but was captured and taken away in the cart that brought him. The Epping Hunt is no longer celebrated, nor is Epping Forest any longer one of the haunts of Easter Monday.

Five miles from St. Paul’s cathedral lies a broad heath on the plateau of a hill. This is Hampstead Heath. Two hundred years ago, on the edge of the heath was a Spa, with a fashionable assembly-room and a tavern. The Spa decayed, and the place became the residence of a few wealthy merchants, each with his stately garden. Some of these houses and these gardens survive to this day; most of them are built over, and Hampstead is now a suburb of eighty thousand people, standing on the slope and top of a long hill rising to the height of nearly five hundred feet. The heath, however, has never been built upon. It is a strangely beautiful place; not a park, not a garden, not anything artificial, simply a wild heath covered with old and twisted gorse bushes, with fern and bramble, and in spring lovely with the white-thorn and the blackthorn and the blossoms of the wild crab-apple, Britain’s only native fruit. The heath is cut up into miniature slopes and tiny valleys; a high causeway runs right across it; the place is so high that there is a noble view of the country beyond, while at rare intervals, when the air is clear, the whole valley of the Thames lies at the spectator’s feet, and London, with her thousand spires and towers is clearly visible, with St. Paul’s towering over the whole.

The heath is the favorite resort of the holiday makers of Easter Monday; a kind of fair is permitted on one side, with booths and the customary bawling. There are never any shows on Hampstead Heath—I know not why. The booths are for rifle galleries, for tea and coffee and ices, for cakes and ginger-beer, for crafty varieties in the game of dropping rings or pretty trifles for bowls and skittles, and for “shying” sticks at cocoanuts. No stalls are allowed for the sale of strong drink. Here the people assemble in the morning, beginning about ten, and continue to arrive all day long, dispersing only when the sun goes down and the evening becomes too cold for strolling about. They may be numbered by the hundred thousand. Here are the factory girls, going about in little companies, adorned with crimson and blue feathers; they run about laughing and shrieking in the simple joy of life and the exhilarating presence of the crowd; they do not associate with the lads, who dress up their hats with paper ribbon and hurl jokes, lacking in originality as in delicacy, at the girls as they run past. There are a great many children; the policemen in the evening bring the lost ones, disconsolate, to the station. Some of them have come with their parents; some of them, provided with a penny each, have come alone; it is wonderful to see what little mites run about the heath, hand in hand, without any parents or guardians. There are young married couples carrying the baby. All the people alike crowd into the booths and take their chance at what is going on; they “shy” at the cocoanuts as if it were a new game invented for that day, they dance in the grass to the inspiring strains of a concertina, they swing uproariously in the high wooden carriages, they are whirled breathlessly round and round on the steam-conducted wooden cavalry, and all the time with shouting and with laughing incessant. For, you see, the supreme joy, the true foundation of all this happiness, is the fact that they are all out again in the open, that the winter is over and gone, and that they can once more come out all together, as they love, in a vast multitude. To be out in the open, whether on the seashore or on Hampstead Heath, in a great crowd, is itself happiness enough. There is more than the joy of being in a crowd; there is also the joy of being once more on the green turf. Deep down, again, in the hearts of these townbred cockneys there lies, ineradicable, the love of the green fields and the country air. So some of them leave the crowd and wander on the less frequented part of the heath. They look for flowers, and pick what they can find; the season is not generally so far advanced as to tempt them with branches of hawthorn, nor are the fields yet covered with buttercups; the buds are swelling, the grass puts on a brighter green, but the spring as yet is all in promise. There are other country places of resort, but Hampstead is the favorite.

For those who do not go out of London on Easter Monday there are more quiet recreations. On that day Canon Barnett opens his annual exhibition of loan pictures at his schools beside his church at Whitechapel; to the people of his quarter he offers every year an exhibition of pictures which is really one of the best of the yearly shows, though the West End knows nothing about it, and there is no private view attended by the fashionable folk, who go to see each other. There is a catalogue; it is designed as a guide and an aid to the reader; it is therefore descriptive; in the evening ladies go round with small parties and give little talks upon the pictures, explaining what the artist meant and how his design has been carried out. Such a party I once watched before Burne-Jones’s picture of “The Briar Rose.” The people gazed; they saw the brilliant coloring, the briar-rose everywhere, the sleeping knights, the courtyard—all. Then the guide began, and their faces lit up with pleasure and understanding, and all went home that evening richer for the contemplation and the comprehension of one great work of art.

At the People’s Palace there are concerts morning and evening; perhaps also there is some exhibition or attraction of another kind; there are other loan exhibitions possible besides those of art.

Some of the people, but not many, go off westward and wander about the halls of the British Museum. I do not know why they go there, because ancient Egypt is to them no more than modern Mexico, and the Etruscan vases are no more interesting than the “Souvenir of Margate,” which costs a penny. But they do go; they roam from room to room with listless indifference, seeing nothing. In the same spirit of curiosity, baffled yet satisfied, they go to the South Kensington Museum and gaze upon its treasures of art; or they go to the National Portrait Gallery, finding in Queen Anne Boleyn a striking likeness to their own Maria, but otherwise not profiting in any discoverable manner by the contents of the gallery. And some of them go to the National Gallery, where there are pictures which tell stories. Or some get as far as Kew Gardens, tempted by the reputation of the houses which provide tea and shrimps and water-cresses outside the gardens, as much as by the Palm House and the Orchid Houses within.

The streets on Easter Monday present a curious Sunday-like appearance, with shops shut and no vehicles except the omnibus, but in the evening the theater and the music-hall are open, and they are crammed with people.

Therefore, though Easter Monday is the greatest of the people’s holidays, it is so chiefly because it is the first, and because, like the May-day of old, it stands for the end of the long, dark winter and the first promise of the spring. Even in the streets, the streets of dreary monotony, the East Londoners feel their blood stir and their pulses quicken when the April day draws out and once more there comes an evening light enough and long enough to take them out by tram beyond the bricks.

The holiday of early summer is Whit-Monday, which is also a movable feast, and falls seven weeks after Easter, so that it is due on some day between May 12th and June 12th. I have already observed that the cold east wind, which retards our spring, generally ceases before the middle of May, though in our climate nothing is certain—not even hot weather in July and August. When it falls reasonably late, say in the first week of June, there is some probability that the day will be warm, even though there may be showers; that the woods will be resonant with warblers, the fields golden with buttercups, the hedges bright with spring flowers, the bushes white and pink with May blossom, and the orchards glorious with the pink of the apple and the creamy white of the cherry and the pear. On this day the East Londoner goes farther afield; he is not content with Hampstead Heath, and he will not remain under cover at the Crystal Palace. Trains convey him out of London. He goes down to Southend, at the mouth of the Thames; there, at low tide, he can gaze upon a vast expanse of mud or he can walk down a pier a mile and a half long, or, if it is high tide, he may delight in the dancing waters with innumerable boats and yachts. Above all, at Southend he will find all the delights that endear the seaside to him; there is the tea with shrimps—countless shrimps, quarts and gallons of shrimps; he is among his own kind; there is no one to scoff when, to the music of the concertina, he takes out his companion to dance in the road; he sings his music-hall ditties unchecked; he bawls the cry of the day, and it is counted unto him for infinite humor. Southend on Whit-Monday is a place for the comic man and the comic artist; it is also the place for the humorist.

One must not be hard upon the Whit-Monday holiday-maker. He is at least good-humored; there is less drunkenness than one would expect; there is very little fighting, but there is noise—yes, there is a good deal of noise. These children of nature, if they feel happy, instinctively laugh and shout to proclaim their happiness. They would like the bystanders to share it with them; they cannot understand the calm, cold and unsympathetic faces which gaze upon them as they go bawling on their way. They would like a friendly chorus, a fraternal hand upon the shoulder, an invitation to a drink. Let us put ourselves in their place and have patience with them.

I have already mentioned Epping Forest in connection with the cockney hunt of Easter Monday. But to be seen in the true splendor of its beauty Epping Forest must be visited in early June. It is the East Londoner’s forest; fifty years ago he had two; on the east of Epping Forest lay another and a larger, called Hainault Forest. It was disforested and cleared and laid out in farms in the year 1850. Epping, however, remains. It is about sixteen miles north of the river; encroachments have eaten into its borders, and almost into its very heart. For a long time no one paid any attention. Suddenly, however, it was discovered that the forest, which had once covered twelve thousand acres, now covered only three thousand. Three fourths had been simply stolen. Then the City of London woke up, appointed a verderer and rangers, drew a map of what was left, and sternly forbade any more encroachments. What is left is a very beautiful wild forest; deer roam about its glades; for the greater part of the year it is quite a lonely place, only receiving visitors on Saturday afternoons and Sundays. It is a narrow, cigar-shaped wood about a mile broad and eight miles long. There are outlying bits on the north and on the south. The ancient continuity of the forest is gone, but there are tangles of real wood and coppice here and there; the central point of the forest, that which attracts most people, is a small bit of wild wood lying on a hill. Here the ground is rough and broken; everywhere are oaks, elms, beeches, and hornbeams, with a veritable jungle of wild roses, sloes, thorns, and brambles. The woods are filled with singing birds; the ground is covered with wild flowers. Imagine the joy of the East Londoner on Whit-Monday when he plunges up to his knees in the buttercups, the wild anemones, and the flowering grasses, while the lark sings overhead, and thrush and blackbird call from the woods around him, and the sun warms him and the sweet air refreshes him. Such an one I followed once and watched. He was a young fellow of twenty-one or so, with his wife, a girl of nineteen, behind him. He had taken the pipe out of his mouth; instinctively he felt that the pipe was out of place; he threw himself down upon the grass and clasped his hands under his head. “Gawspel truth, old gal!” he cried, out of the fullness of his heart. “It’s fine! It’s fine!”

It was fine, and it was Whit-Monday, and a hundred thousand others like unto this young fellow and his bride were wandering about the forest that day.

There are not many students of archæology in East London, which is a pity, since there are many points of interest within their reach. All round the forest, for instance, and within the forest there are treasures. To begin with, there are two ancient British camps still in good preservation; there is a most picturesque deserted church, called old Chingford church; there is the ancient Saxon church, whose walls are oaken trunks, put up to commemorate the halt of those who carried St. Cuthbert’s bones; there is Waltham Abbey, where King Harold lies buried; and if you take a little walk to the east you will find yourself at Chigwell, and you may dine at the inn where, in the Gordon troubles, as presented in “Barnaby Rudge,” the landlord found a trifle of glass broken. But the joy in things ancient has not yet been found out by the London workman. Now and again he is a lover of birds or a student of flowers; for such an one Epping is a haunt of which he can never tire, for it is the only place near London where he can watch heron, hawk, kingfisher, and the wild water-fowl.

Or the people go farther afield by cheap excursion trains. Their coming is not welcomed by the inhabitants of the towns which are their destination. They go to Brighton or to Hastings; they sit in long rows, side by side, upon the shingle idly watching the waves; they go to Portsmouth and sit on Southsea beach watching the ships. They even get across to the Isle of Wight. Last year I was at a little town in that island called Yarmouth. I there made the acquaintance of an ancient mariner who was employed by Lloyd’s to take the names of all the ships which passed into the Solent, here a narrow strait. He told me in conversation that I ought to see their church, which is old and beautiful. I replied that I had attempted to do so, but found the door shut. Upon which he gave me the following remarkable reason for this apparent want of hospitality. I quote his words to show the local opinion of the tripper. “You see,” he said, “it’s all along of they London trippers. One Whit-Monday they came here and they found the church doors open and in they went, nosebags and cigarettes and all. Then the parson he came along, and he looked in. ‘Well,’ says the parson, ‘Dash my wig!’ he says. ‘Get up off of them seats,’ he says, ‘and take your ’ats off your ’eads,’ he says, ‘and take they stinkin’ bits o’ paper out of your mouths,’ he says, ‘and get out of the bloomin’ church,’ he says. And he puts the key in his own pocket, and that’s why you can’t get into the church.” The remarkable language attributed to the parson on this occasion illustrates the depth of local feeling about East London out on a holiday.

The August bank-holiday is a repetition of Whit-Monday, without the freshness of that early summer day. By the end of July the foliage of the trees has become dark and heavy; the best of the flowers are over in field as well as garden; the sadness of autumn is beginning. All through the summer, especially on Saturdays and Sundays, the excursion trains are running in all directions, but especially to the seaside; the excursion steamers run to Southend, Walton, Margate, and Ramsgate. For those who stay at home there are the East-End parks, Victoria Park, West Ham Park, Finsbury Park, Clissold Park, Wanstead Park. They are thronged with people strolling or sitting quietly along the walks. All these parks are alike in their main features; they are laid out in walks and avenues planted with trees; they contain broad tracts of green turf; there is an inclosure for cricket; sometimes there is a gymnasium, and there is an ornamental water, generally very pretty, with rustic bridges, swans, and boats let out for hire. Where there is no park, as at Wapping and Poplar by the riverside, there are recreation grounds. In all of them a band of music plays on stated evenings.

This restoration of the garden to the people is a great feature of modern attempts at civilization; it seems terrible that there should be no place anywhere for children to play except the streets, or for the old people to sit except in the public house. London is now dotted with parks, chiefly small and covered with gardens. Nearly all the churchyards have been converted into gardens; the headstones are ranged along the walls; they might just as well be taken away; one or two “altar tombs” are left. The rest of the ground is planted with flowering shrubs—lilac, laburnum, ribes, the Pyrus Japonica, and the like; the walks are asphalted, and seats are provided. Nearly all the year round one may see the old people walking about the paths or sitting in the sun; part of the ground is given to the children. It is difficult, indeed, to exaggerate the boon conferred upon a crowded city by these breathing-places, where one can be quiet. The summer amusements of the people, you will observe, are not all made up of noisy crowds and musical trippers; add the summer evening walk in the park and, all the year round, the rest in the garden that is a disused burial-ground.

For the children there is the day in the country. Every summer day long caravans of wagons filled with children, singing and shouting as they go, drive along the roads to the nearest country place, or excursion trains crammed with children are carried off to the nearest seaside places. They run about on the seashore, they bathe, they sit down to a tea of cake and buns, and they are taken home at night tired out but singing and shouting to the end. This summer “day out” is the one great holiday for the children; they scheme to get put on the lists of more than one excursion; they look forward to it; they count upon it. Every year vigorous appeals are made in the papers for help to send the children away upon their annual holiday; these appeals are of course pitched extravagantly high; they talk a conventional jargon about the little ones who grow up without ever gazing upon a green leaf or a tree. Rubbish! There is not a street anywhere in London where a garden, if it is only a disused burial-ground, is not accessible if the children choose to go there. Mostly the very little ones prefer the dirt pies in the gutter, but even for them the wagonette comes now and then to carry them off for the whole day to the grass of Victoria Park. Still, it is a very great thing that they should, once at least in the year, be carried away into real country and have a glimpse of meadows, woods, and cows and sheep.

When they grow older they are still better off. It is quite common now for young men who carry on the Settlements and the boys’ clubs to get the lads under their care to save up week by week until they have amassed the sum of five shillings. On this capital, with management, they are enabled to get a week’s holiday by the seaside. It is a glorious time for them. A convenient place is found; it must be on the seashore; it should be quite free from any town or village; there must be no temptations of any kind; the lads are there to breathe fresh air and life, quite cut off from any suggestion of town life. They sleep, every boy in his own rug, on dry, clean straw in a barn, which is also their refectory, their lecture-hall, their concert and their singing-room. On the seashore there are boats for them; they row and sail and they go deep-sea fishing; they bathe every day, and they have swimming matches; on the sands they run races; in the evening they sing, they box, they look at dissolving views, and they lie down on the straw to rest. Their food is plain; it consists principally of boiled beef and potatoes, with cocoa and coffee and bread and butter. Of course this magnificent holiday demands a head and leader and obedience. But there is hardly ever any hitch or breakdown or row among the lads.

The hopping, considered as an amusement, should be placed next, but we have already shown the place it takes in the year of the factory girl. It is indeed amusement to all concerned, especially if the weather be fine; it is amusement with profit; the hoppers come home with a pocket full of money; they have left their pasty cheeks in the country, and they bring back rosy cheeks and freckled noses and sunburned hands, with the highest spirits possible. The hopping, I confess, is not always idyllic. Last autumn it was reported that Maidstone Gaol was filled with hoppers charged with being disorderly; their camps might be conducted with more care for cleanliness; London roughs should not be allowed to come down on Sunday and mar this Arcadia. But the complainant, a well-known clergyman of the district, spoke with moderated condemnation. A more careful classification of the families in each encampment, he thinks; some check on the Sunday drink, which now flows at the sweet will of the people; some hindrance to the incursion of the Sunday rough; a more careful system of inspection—these things would go far to remove all reproach from the hopping. Meantime, as a proof of the substantial results of the work the roadway outside the principal station for their return was this year observed to be strewn with the old boots discarded by the hoppers when they bought new ones on their way home.

The river Lea, which, according to some, is the natural boundary of East London,—but it has leaped across that boundary,—is part of the summer amusements. The stream at its mouth, where it is a tributary to the Thames, is a black and murky river indeed. Higher up above the works it is a pleasant little river, winding along at leisure through a broad, marshy valley. The ground is soft and easy to be worked, the incline is so gradual that it might easily and at small expense be made an ornamental stream, moderately broad and able to carry racing boats, flowing beside gardens and under summer-houses and between orchards from its source to its mouth. Instead of this, it has been mercilessly divided into “cuts,” channels, and mill-streams running off at wide angles, joining again lower down, separating again into other cuts and channels, again to unite. On its way it receives the refuse of mills, the refuse of towns; it passes Ware and Ryehouse, Tottenham, Clapton, and Hackney; its course unfortunately lies for the most part through a broad level of soft earth—marshy and low—which permits these cuttings and humiliations. It is accused of being a sewer; young men row upon it; boys bathe in it, but with remonstrance and complaint. The stream is, it must be confessed, in its lower reaches, offensive. Sore throats are caught beside its banks; sometimes people write indignantly about it to the papers. There is a little fuss, summer passes, in the winter no one goes near the river Lea, things are forgotten, and all goes on as before.

It is not possible for a river to flow for thirty miles without having lovely stretches and picturesque corners. The Lea, with all its drawbacks, does possess these inevitable lapses into beauty. But in these pages we cannot stop to point them out. Where the Lea is beautiful it is outside the widest limits assignable to East London. Where the Lea is ugly, dirty, and disreputable, it used to form the eastern boundary to East London.

In the brief sketch of the summer amusements I have said nothing of the bicycle. Now, all the roads outside London are on Saturday and Sunday dotted with the frequent bicycle. It goes out in companies of twenty and thirty; it goes out by twos and threes; it goes out singly. On one Sunday twenty-five thousand bicycles were counted crossing one bridge over the Thames and making for the country beyond. And it seems that there are none so poor as not to afford a bicycle. The secret is, I believe, that a second-hand bicycle, or a bicycle of the last fashion but one, or a damaged bicycle, may be purchased of its owner for a mere trifle, and these lads learn very quickly how to repair the machine themselves.

But the summer all too quickly draws to an end. By the middle of September twilight falls before seven. There are no more evening spins ten miles out and back again; by the end of October twilight falls at five; then there are no more Saturday afternoons on the road. The weather breaks, the roads are heavy, the bicycle is laid aside for the next four months, perhaps for more, because the cold east wind of early spring does not make the roads pleasant except for the hardiest and the strongest. The winter amusements begin. For the factory girls and the dockers we have seen what they are: the street first and foremost; always the street, imperfectly lit, the pavement crowded; always the street, in which the girls march up and down three or four abreast. Their laugh is loud, but it is not forced; their jokes and their badinage with the lads are commonplace and coarse, but they pass for wit; they enjoy the quick pulse when all the world is young; they are as happy as any girls in any other class; they need not our pity; youth, if it has enough to eat and its evening of amusement, is always happy.

They have, then, the boulevard without the café, the street with the public house and the invitation from youth, prodigal of its pence, to step in and have a drink. In addition, they have the music-hall and the theater. For some there is the club; but only a few, comparatively, can be persuaded to go into the club for an hour or two every evening. Most of them have no desire for a quiet place; they are obliged to be quiet in the factory; at night they like to make up for the day’s long silence.

So with their companions, the casual hands, the factory lads, the Hooligans, the children of the kerb, they rejoice in the days of their youth.

Let us mount the social scale; we come to the craftsman in steady work, to the small clerk, to the small shopkeeper. Not that these are of equal rank. The working-man consorts with other working-men; the small clerk calls himself a gentleman; the small shopkeeper is a master. What have they for amusements? The small shopkeeper seems to get along altogether without any amusement. He keeps his “place” open till late in the evening; he shuts it, takes his supper, and goes to bed. His social ambitions are limited by the distinctions to be acquired in his chapel; he reads a halfpenny journal for all his literature.

As for what is offered to those who will accept these gifts, there are lectures first and foremost; there are the lectures offered every winter at Toynbee Hall. These lectures are not, if you please, given by the “man in the street”; the lecturers are the most distinguished men in their own lines to be found; there is no talking “down” to the Whitechapel audience; those serious faces show that they are here to be taught, if the lecturer has anything to tell them, or to receive suggestions and advice; they are all of the working-class; they are far more appreciative than the audiences of the West End; they read and think; they have been trained and encouraged to read and think by Canon Barnett for many years; they are very much in earnest, and they do not come with vacuous minds; as Emerson said of the traveler so we may say of a man who listens to a lecture—he takes away what he brought with him. About the Settlements and the gifts which they offer, with full hands, to the people, I speak in the next chapter.

What Barnett and Toynbee Hall have done for the intellectual side the People’s Palace has done for the musical side. Its cheap concerts have led the people, naturally inclined to music, insensibly into ways of good taste; the palace was fortunate, at first, in getting a musical director who knew how to lead the people on; one of the most gratifying successes of this institution has been its music. They have now their own orchestra, vocal and instrumental. At the same place are held exhibitions, from time to time, of East London industries, of pictures, of arts and crafts of all kinds. Here is the finest gymnasium in London, and here are many clubs—for foot-ball, cricket, and games of all kinds.

One omission in the amusements of London must be noted. There are no public dancing-halls. I see no reason at all why a public dancing-hall should not be carried on with as much attention to good behavior as a private dance, or a theater, or any other place where people assemble together. It requires only the coöperation of the people themselves, without the aid of the police. Meantime, there is no form of exercise, to my mind, so delightful to the young and so healthful as dancing; nothing that more satisfies the restlessness of youth than the rapid and rhythmic movement of the limbs in the dance. Nature makes the young long to jump about; education should take in hand their jumping and make it part of the orderly recreation which we are substituting for the old brutal sports. Dancing was tried at the People’s Palace; it was a great success; the balls given in the Queen’s Hall were crowded, and the people were as orderly as could be desired. But, indeed, the whole feeling of the assembly was in favor of order.

The theater and the music-hall claim, and claim successfully, their supporters; concerning the former one has only to recognize that it may be a school of good manners, as well as of good sentiments, and that it is also an institution capable of ruining a whole generation. The pieces given at the theaters of East London are, so far as I have observed, chiefly melodramas. The music-halls are places frankly of amusement, and for the most part, I believe, vulgar enough, but not otherwise mischievous.

And there is the public billiard-room, with all that it means—the betting man, the professional player, the proximity to the bar, the beer and the tobacco, and the talk. It attracts the young clerk more readily than the young craftsman. It is his first step downward. If it does not plunge him beneath the waves after the fashion that we have witnessed, it will keep him where he is and what he is—a writing machine, a machine on hire at a wage not so very much better than a typewriting instrument, all his life. Let us rather contemplate the thousands of lads who attend the classes at the palace, the polytechnics, and the Settlements; let us rather think of those who crowd into the concerts, sit as students at the lectures and listen and look on while the guide leads them round the exhibitions.

In this long list of amusements I must have omitted some, perhaps many. For instance, I have not spoken of reading or of literature. The craftsman of East London has not yet begun to read books; at present he only reads the paper; his children read the penny dreadfuls, and are beginning to read books.

Considering that Sunday afternoon is especially the time of rest, we must not forget one form of recreation peculiar to that time. It takes the form of an address given in some chapel. There is generally a short service, with prayer and the singing of a hymn; the people who attend and crowd the chapel seem to like this addition to the address which follows. It is intended to be of a kind likely to interest and to instruct; the first duty of the lecturer is to choose a subject which does both; I have myself on more than one occasion attempted to address working-men on the Sunday afternoon; I have found them easy to interest and quick to take up points. As at Toynbee Hall, one must not talk “down” to them. Indeed, the men who come to such lectures are the most intelligent and the best educated of the whole population. It is pleasant and restful for them; the chapel is warm; the singing is not disagreeable, even though in their own homes psalmody is not commonly practised; to be called away on a dark and gloomy November afternoon and led gently into another world, with new scenery and other conditions, is that complete change which is the best rest of all. The lecturer need not be afraid of tiring his audience; he may go on as long as he pleases; when he leaves off they will crowd round him and beg him to come again.

Many other omissions I have made purposely. There are the drinking and the gambling clubs, the betting clubs, haunts, and dens, if one choose to consult the police and to hunt them up, which would enable one to finish this chapter with a lurid picture. Where there are so many men and women there will always be found a percentage of the bad, the worse, and the worst. It is the hopeful point about East London that wherever the better things are offered they are accepted by the better sort; not by a few here and a few there, but by thousands who are worthy of the better things.

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XII

THE HELPING HAND

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XII

THE HELPING HAND

THE work that lies before us in every city waiting for the Helping Hand—the human wreckage, bankruptcy, age, sickness, poverty, which must always be forming anew however we may meet it and find alleviation—will certainly not decrease as the years roll on. The point for us to consider here is not the volume and variety of the forces which cause this wreckage, but the attempts which are now being made to find this alleviation and, if possible, a remedy.

The Helping Hand has a history, and it is very simple:

1. First of all it threw a penny to the beggar because he was a beggar.

2. Secondly, it offered free meals and free quarters in every monastic house to every beggar because he was a beggar.

3. It continued to give the penny and the free meals and the lodging to the beggar because he was a beggar, but it ordered the beggar to go back to work.

4. It arrested, imprisoned, branded, and flogged the beggar because he was a beggar. It continued also to give him a penny for the same reason.

5. It founded almshouses for some of the aged poor; those who could not get in continued to receive their penny and their flogging because they were beggars.

6. It founded workhouses, Bridewell, and houses of correction for the beggar. And it continued to give that penny to the beggar because he was a beggar.

7. It built houses for the reception of the poor who could no longer work, infirmaries for the sick, orphanages and homes for poor children, casual wards for the homeless. It made begging an offense in the eyes of the law. Yet it continued to give the beggar a penny because he was a beggar.

8. It discovered that a multitude of rogues and people who will not work trade upon the charity and the pity of people, sending around letters asking for help. It therefore established an association, with branches everywhere, to expose the fraudulent. Yet it continued to give the beggar a penny because he was a beggar.

In other words, the Helping Hand has never been able to refrain from giving that penny which encourages the “masterless” man, and the man who will not work, and the fraudulent, and the writer of the begging letter. Could the Helping Hand be persuaded to refuse that penny for a single fortnight, to turn a deaf ear resolutely to the starving family on the road, to the starving children on the pavement, to the starving woman who stands silent, mournful, appealing with mute looks of misery, only for a single fortnight, the existence of the beggar would come to a sudden end. This the Helping Hand can never be persuaded to do. Therefore we have with us not only the real misery caused by fate, by fortune, by the natural consequences of folly and weakness and crime, but also the pretended misery of those who live upon the pity of the world and trade on that strange self-indulgence which gives the dole to remove an unpleasant object out of sight and to awaken the glow which follows with the sense of charity.

I leave aside in this place the casual dole—the penny to the beggar because he is a beggar; it is illustrated for all time by the partition of the cloak between St. Martin and the beggar. The saint, then a gallant cavalryman, did not stop—or stoop—to inquire into the merits of the case; here was a beggar. Was he really starving? could he work? were his sufferings pretended? was he really cold? did he deserve any help at all? Was he, on the contrary, well fed and nourished, money in purse, food in wallet, a sufficiency of clothes on his back, a fire and a pot over it at home, with a well-fed family and a wife on the same “lay” at the other gate of the city? Let us leave the Bishop of Ligugé as a type for all the centuries of the unthinking charity which gives the penny to the beggar because he is a beggar.

Let us turn to other and later developments. The Helping Hand has founded and endowed and now maintains by voluntary contributions hospitals of every kind for the sick; by rates and taxes, workhouses for the poor, schools for the children. Yet there has passed—there is now passing—over the work of charity a great and most remarkable revolution; it is a revolution characteristic of a time in which every theory of social life, social conditions, and social responsibilities has been completely changed. The old duties remain still; schools and hospitals have been multiplied; if almshouses have not increased, the workhouse system has become better organized. But we have become aware of other duties, of new responsibilities. It is now understood that it is not enough to put the children to school from one to fourteen; they must be looked after when they leave school; it is not enough to provide for the diseases of the body; we must make provision for the diseases, and the cause of the diseases, of the mind. The Helping Hand is at work in these days for the arrest of degeneracy; for the opening up of art, literature, music, science, culture of all kinds, to the better sort among the working-classes; for the wider extension of the area and the depth of culture; for the creation of that kind of public opinion which, more than anything else, makes for public order and the maintenance of law; for the care and safeguarding of young people at the perilous time of emancipation from school; for the rescue of those who can be rescued; for the cleansing of the slums; for the restoration to the world of those who, as we have seen, have dropped out; and for the prevention of pauperizing by ill-considered schemes of ill-informed benevolence.

These are general terms. In order to carry out its work in detail, the Helping Hand looks after the children in their homes, while the Board-school looks after their teaching; it provides cases for the hospital, and aids the parish authorities during sickness in the home; it introduces the social side into the lives of the better sort; it devises attractions for the young people who stand at the parting of the ways, where temptation is strong and the primrose path is bright with flowers; it teaches the lads a trade, and the girls a love for the quiet life; it wages war with the public house and the street; it endeavors to bring back the lowest strata to a sense of religion which they have come to think the peculiar and rather unaccountable property of “class”; it brings friendliness among folk who have only known the order of the policeman.

These are some of the functions which to-day are exercised by the Helping Hand. In East London we can see the hand at work with greater energy, wiser supervision, and in directions more varied than in any other city of Great Britain. I do not venture, for the obvious reason of ignorance, upon comparison with American cities, but I should think that we have in East London, with its vast population of working-people of all kinds, ranging from the highly-paid foreman to the casual hand, the lad of the street, the wastrel, and the wreck, a mass of humanity which is not paralleled anywhere, and a corresponding amount of philanthropic endeavor which it would be impossible to equal elsewhere.

In this immense multitude there are many slums of the worst kind; but they are now much fewer, and they are much less offensive, than they were; the most terrible of the plague spots seem to have been improved away; to find the real old slum, the foul, indescribable human pigsty, one must no longer look for it in East London. That is to say, there are, I dare say, a few of the old slums left, but the places—there were then many of them—into which one peered, shuddering, twenty years ago, have now vanished. The police, the clergy, the ladies who go about the parish, can still take the visitor into strange courts and noisome tenements, but he who remembers the former state of things feels that light and air and a certain amount of public opinion, with some measure of cleanliness, have been brought to the old-fashioned slum by the modern Helping Hand.

If the American visitor to London desires to see a real old-fashioned slum—one where all the surroundings, physical and moral, are, to use the mild word of the day, absolutely “insanitary”—I would recommend him not to try East London, where he would have to search long for what he wants, but to pay a visit to Guy’s Hospital on the south side of the Thames and to seek the guidance of one of the students through the courts of crime and grime which still lie pretty thickly round that fortress of the army of health.

If you read novels of the day describing things brutal beyond belief, it will be well to suspect that the situations are a little mixed. Art must exaggerate; art must select; art must group. In this way it is quite possible that a picture tendered as of to-day may really belong to twenty years ago. There is still plenty of misery left in East London—we need, in fact, no exaggeration; I could fill these pages with lamentable histories; the people are still very much “down below”; some of them are a long way down; they are not only suffering for the sins of their fathers, they are busily piling up by their own sins sufferings for their children. Terrible has been their own inheritance; more terrible still will be the inheritance of the children.

Among these people, being such as they are, a whole army is at work continually. Let me now, in such short space as is at my command, consider in detail some of the more important methods by which this army is at work. It is not yet an army completely drilled and subdivided and commanded; some of their work overlaps, or hinders, other work. Perhaps it is not to be desired that this army should be completely drilled and organized. We do not ask for the crystallized methods of French education, or the iron drill of the Prussian sergeant. Let us leave some room for individual choice. Given certain principles of action, the element of personal freedom in carrying out these principles becomes of vital importance.

I have spoken of the revolution in opinion as to the responsibilities of the better educated and the wealthier toward those below them. Perhaps the situation may be illustrated by considering the change that has passed over us in our conception of what civilization should mean. The view of the eighteenth century was that civilization, culture, the pursuit of art, reading, learning of all kinds, science, the power, as well as the right, of government belonged essentially to the upper classes. When the good people of Spalding, for instance, in the year 1701, founded a literary society they called it the “Spalding Gentlemen’s Society”—only gentlemen, you see, could be expected to take any interest in things that belong to civilization. It was further considered that it was impossible to expect civilizing influences to bear upon the working-classes. They were kept in order by discipline, by the prison, and by the lash. To open the doors of education, to give them access to the tree of knowledge, would be a most dangerous, a most fatal, mistake. Even at the present day one hears, at times, the belated cry that the working-classes need no more than the barest elements of learning.

In certain circles the distinction between the cultured class and those outside was marked by artificial notes of manner and of speech. The limits were intolerably narrow; outside these circles there was no leadership, no statesmanship, possible.

But apart from the pretensions of the eighteenth-century aristocracy it was considered by the middle class and the professional class alike dangerous to interfere with Providence; the working-class were born to do service; let them learn to do it. Religion, of course, they could have if they wanted it; the church was there, the doors were open every Sunday, anybody might go in; the clergyman would visit the sick, if he were invited; the children were baptized in the church; some of the people were married in the church; all the people were buried in the churchyard, with the service of the church by law established. That was all; there were very few schools; education, even if the parents wished it, was not to be had, and the folk were left altogether to their own devices. They had been forced out of the City to make room for warehouses and offices; they lived in their own quarters, especially along the riverside and in Whitechapel, and they were left quite alone to their own devices.

There were no police; the hand of the law among these crowded streets was weak; they did what they pleased. There is a story belonging to the year 1790, or thereabouts, of a man living in Wapping, just outside the Tower of London, which was always garrisoned with troops. This man gave offense to his neighbors by complying with some obnoxious law. He heard that they were going to attack him, meaning that they were going to murder him. The man had the bulldog courage of his time; he sent away his wife and children; he got a friend as brave as himself to join him; he closed his lower shutters and barricaded his door; he laid in ammunition, and he brought in and loaded two guns, one for himself and one for his friend.

At nightfall the attacking party arrived; they were armed with guns and stones. They began with a volley of the latter; the besieged paid no attention; they then fired at the windows; the besieged received their fire, and while they were loading again let fly among them, and killed or wounded two or three. They retired in confusion, but returned in larger numbers and with greater fury. All night long the unequal combat raged. When their ammunition was spent the two men dropped out of a back window into a timber yard, where they hid in a saw-pit. Observe that this battle lasted all the night, close to the Tower, and that no soldiers were sent out to stop it till the morning, when the mischief was done and the house was sacked. And no one was arrested, no one was punished, save the men who were shot. Can any story more clearly indicate the abandonment of the people to their own devices?

Reading these things, remembering how brutal, how ignorant, how degraded were whole masses of our people at that time, I am amazed that we came out of that long struggle of 1792–1815 without some awful outburst, some Jacquerie, like that of the Parisian mob, which might have drenched our land, as it did that of France, with blood and murder. And I think that when the social history of the nineteenth century, which we who have lived in it cannot grasp, save in parts, comes to be really and impartially considered, the chief feature, the redeeming point, will be that it began to recognize in practice the elementary truths that we are all responsible for each other, that each is his brother’s keeper, that no class can separate itself from the rest, and that no civilization is durable or safe unless it includes the whole people.