The unfit and the unneeded! Industry does not clamor for them. There are no jobs going begging through lack of men and women. The dockers crowd at the entrance gate, and curse and turn away when the foreman does not give them a call. The engineers who have work pay six shillings a week to their brother engineers who can find nothing to do; 514,000 textile workers oppose a resolution condemning the employment of children under fifteen. Women, and plenty to spare, are found to toil under the sweat-shop masters for tenpence a day of fourteen hours. Alfred Freeman crawls to muddy death because he loses his job. Ellen Hughes Hunt prefers Regent’s Canal to Islington Workhouse. Frank Cavilla cuts the throats of his wife and children because he cannot find work enough to give them food and shelter.
The unfit and the unneeded! The miserable and despised and forgotten, dying in the social shambles. The progeny of prostitution-of the prostitution of men and women and children, of flesh and blood, and sparkle and spirit; in brief, the prostitution of labor. If this is the best that civilization can do for the human, then give us howling and naked savagery. Far better to be a people of the wilderness and desert, of the cave and the squatting-place, than to be a people of the machine and the Abyss.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE.
The Hunger Wail.
I hold, if the Almighty had ever made a set of
men to do all of the eating and none of the work,
he would have made them with mouths only, and no
hands; and if he had ever made another set that he
had intended should do all the work and none of
the eating, he would have made them without mouths
and with all hands.
-ABRAHAM LINCOLN.
MY FATHER HAS MORE STAMINA than I, for he is country-born.’
The speaker, a bright young East Ender, was lamenting his poor physical development.
‘Look at my scrawny arm, will you.’ He pulled up his sleeve. ‘Not enough to eat, that’s what’s the matter with it. Oh, not now. I have what I want to eat these days. But it’s too late. It can’t make up for what I didn’t have to eat when I was a kiddy. Dad came up to London from the Fen Country. Mother died, and there were six of us kiddies and dad living in two small rooms.
‘He had hard times, dad did. He might have chucked us, but he didn’t. He slaved all day, and at night he came home and cooked and cared for us. He was father and mother, both. He did his best, but we didn’t have enough to eat. We rarely saw meat, and then of the worst. And it is not good for growing kiddies to sit down to a dinner of bread and a bit of cheese, and not enough of it.
‘And what’s the result? I am undersized, and I haven’t the stamina of my dad. It was starved out of me. In a couple of generations there’ll be no more of me here in London. Yet there’s my younger brother; he’s bigger and better developed. You see, dad and we children held together, and that accounts for it.’
‘But I don’t see,’ I objected. ‘I should think, under such conditions, that the vitality should decrease and the younger children be born weaker and weaker.’
‘Not when they hold together,’ he replied. ‘Whenever you come along in the East End and see a child of from eight to twelve, good-sized, well-developed, and healthy-looking, just you ask, and you will find that it is the youngest in the family, or at least is one of the younger. The way of it is this: the older children starve more than the younger ones. By the time the younger ones come along, the older ones are starting to work, and there is more money coming in, and more food to go around.’
He pulled down his sleeve, a concrete instance of where chronic semi-starvation kills not, but stunts. His voice was but one among the myriads that raise the cry of the hunger wail in the greatest empire in the world. On any one day, over 1,000,000 people are in receipt of poor-law relief in the United Kingdom. One in eleven of the whole working-class receive poor-law relief in the course of the year; 37,500,000 people receive less than $60 per month, per family; and a constant army of 8,000,000 lives on the border of starvation.
A committee of the London County school board makes this declaration: ‘At times, (when there is no special distress), 55,000 children in a state of hunger, which makes it useless to attempt to teach them, are in the schools of London alone.’ The parentheses are mine. ‘When there is no special distress’ means good times in England; for the people of England have come to look upon starvation and suffering, which they call ‘distress,’ as part of the social order. Chronic starvation is looked upon as a matter of course. It is only when acute starvation makes its appearance on a large scale that they think something is unusual.
I shall never forget the bitter wail of a blind man in a little East End shop at the close of a murky day. He had been the eldest of five children, with a mother and no father. Being the eldest, he had starved and worked as a child to put bread into the mouths of his little brothers and sisters. Not once in three months did he ever taste meat. He never knew what it was to have his hunger thoroughly appeased. And he claimed that this chronic starvation of his childhood had robbed him of his sight. To support the claim, he quoted from the report of the Royal Commission on the Blind, ‘Blindness is most prevalent in poor districts, and poverty accelerates this dreadful affliction.’
But he went further, this blind man, and in his voice was the bitterness of an afflicted man to whom society did not give enough to eat. He was one of an army of six million blind in London, and he said that in the blind homes they did not receive half enough to eat. He gave the diet for a day:
Breakfast-3/4 pint of skilly and dry bread.
Dinner-… 3 oz. meat.
1 slice of bread.
1/2 lb. potatoes.
Supper-… 3/4 pint of skilly and dry bread.
Oscar Wilde, God rest his soul, voices the cry of the prison child, which, in varying degree, is the cry of the prison man and woman: ‘The second thing from which a child suffers in prison is hunger. The food that is given to it consists of a piece of usually bad-baked prison bread and a tin of water for breakfast at half-past seven. At twelve o’clock it gets dinner, composed of a tin of coarse Indian meal stirabout (skilly), and at half-past five it gets a piece of dry bread and a tin of water for its supper. This diet in the case of a strong grown man is always productive of illness of some kind, chiefly of course diarrhoea, with its attendant weakness. In fact, in a big prison astringent medicines are served out regularly by the warders as a matter of course. In the case of a child, the child is, as a rule, incapable of eating the food at all. Any one who knows anything about children knows how easily a child’s digestion is upset by a fit of crying, or trouble and mental distress of any kind. A child who has been crying all day long, and perhaps half the night, in a lonely dim-lit cell, and is preyed upon by terror, simply cannot eat food of this coarse, horrible kind. In the case of the little child to whom warden Martin gave the biscuits, the child was crying with hunger on Tuesday morning, and utterly unable to eat the bread and water served to it for its breakfast. Martin went out after the breakfasts had been served and bought the few sweet biscuits for the child rather than see it starving. It was a beautiful action on his part, and was so recognized by the child, who, utterly unconscious of the regulations of the Prison Board, told one of the senior wardens how kind this junior warden had been to him. The result was, of course, a report and a dismissal.’
Robert Blatchford compares the workhouse pauper’s daily diet with the soldier’s, which, when he was a soldier, was not considered liberal enough, and yet is twice as liberal as the pauper’s.
PAUPER DIET SOLDIER
3 1/4 oz. Meat 12 oz.
15 1/2 oz. Bread 24 oz.
6…. oz. Vegetables 8 oz.
The adult male pauper gets meat (outside of soup) but once a week, and the paupers ‘have nearly all that pallid, pasty complexion which is the sure mark of starvation.’