Here is a table, comparing the workhouse pauper’s weekly allowance with the workhouse officer’s weekly allowance.
OFFICER DIET PAUPER
7 lb. Bread 6 3/4 lb.
5 lb. Meat 1 lb. 2 oz.
12 oz. Bacon 2 1/2 oz.
8 oz. Cheese 2 oz.
7 lb. Potatoes 1 1/2 lb.
6 lb. Vegetables none
1 lb. Flour none
2 oz. Lard none
12 oz. Butter 7 oz.
none Rice pudding 1 lb.
And as the same writer remarks: ‘The officer’s diet is still more liberal than the pauper’s; but evidently it is not considered liberal enough, for a footnote is added to the officer’s table saying that ‘a cash payment of two shillings sixpence a week is also made to each resident officer and servant.’ If the pauper has ample food, why does the officer have more? And if the officer has not too much, can the pauper be properly fed on less than half the amount?’
But it is not alone the Ghetto-dweller, the prisoner, and the pauper that starve. Hodge, of the country, does not know what it is always to have a full belly. In truth, it is his empty belly which has driven him to the city in such great numbers. Let us investigate the way of living of a laborer from a parish in the Bradfield Poor Law Union, Berks. Supposing him to have two children, steady work, a rent-free cottage, and an average weekly wage of thirteen shillings, which is equivalent to $3.25, then here is his weekly budget:
(shillings) (pence)
Bread (5 quarterns) ……………………….. 1 10
Flour (1/2 gallon) ………………………… 0 4
Tea (1/4 lb.) …………………………….. 0 6
Butter (1 lb.) ……………………………. 1 3
Lard (1 lb.) ……………………………… 0 6
Sugar (6 lb.) …………………………….. 1 0
Bacon or other meat (about 4 lb.) …………… 2 8
Cheese (1 lb.) ……………………………. 0 8
Milk (half-tin condensed) ………………….. 0 3 1/4
Oil, candles, blue, soap, salt, pepper, etc. …. 1 0
Coal …………………………………….. 1 6
Beer …………………………………….. none
Tobacco ………………………………….. none
Insurance (‘Prudential’) …………………… 0 3
Laborer’s Union …………………………… 0 1
Wood, tools, dispensary, etc. ………………. 0 6
Insurance (‘Foresters’) and margin for clothes .. 1 1 3/4
Total ……………………….. 13s. 0d.
The guardians of the workhouse in the above Union pride themselves on their rigid economy. It costs per pauper per week:
s. d.
Men ……………………………………… 6 1 1/2
Women ……………………………………. 5 6 1/2
Children …………………………………. 5 1 1/4
If the laborer whose budget has been described, should quit his toil and go into the workhouse, he would cost the guardians for
s. d.
Himself ………………………………….. 6 1 1/2
Wife …………………………………….. 5 6 1/2
Two children …………………………….. 10 2 1/2
Total ……………………….. 21s. 10 1/2d.
Or, roughly, $5.46
It would require $5.46 for the workhouse to care for him and his family, which he, somehow, manages to do on $3.25. And in addition, it is an understood fact that it is cheaper to cater for a large number of people-buying, cooking, and serving wholesale-than it is to cater for a small number of people, say a family.
Nevertheless, at the time this budget was compiled, there was in that parish another family, not of four, but eleven persons, who had to live on an income, not of thirteen shillings, but of twelve shillings per week (eleven shillings in winter), and which had, not a rent-free cottage, but a cottage for which it paid three shillings per week.
This must be understood, and understood clearly: Whatever is true of London in the way of poverty and degradation, is true of all England. While Paris is not by any means France, the city of London is England. The frightful conditions which mark London an inferno likewise mark the United Kingdom an inferno. The argument that the decentralization of London would ameliorate conditions is a vain thing and false. If the 6,000,000 people of London were separated into one hundred cities each with a population of 60,000, misery would be decentralized but not diminished. The sum of it would remain as large.
In this instance, Mr. B. S. Rowntree, by an exhaustive analysis, has proved for the country town what Mr. Charles Booth has proved for the metropolis, that fully one-fourth of the dwellers are condemned to a poverty which destroys them physically and spiritually; that fully one-fourth of the dwellers do not have enough to eat, are inadequately clothed, sheltered, and warmed in a rigorous climate, and are doomed to a moral degeneracy which puts them lower than the savage in cleanliness and decency.
After listening to the wail of an old Irish peasant in Kerry, Robert Blatchford asked him what he wanted. ‘The old man leaned upon his spade and looked out across the black peat fields at the lowering skies. “What is it that I’m wantun?” he said; then in a deep plaintive tone he continued, more to himself than to me, “All our brave bhoys and dear gurrls is away an’ over the says, an’ the agent has taken the pig off me, an’ the wet has spiled the praties, an’ I’m an owld man, an’ I want the Day av judgment.”’
The Day of Judgment! More than he want it. From all the land rises the hunger wail, from Ghetto and countryside, from prison and casual ward, from asylum and workhouse-the cry of the people who have not enough to eat. Millions of people, men, women, children, little babes, the blind, the deaf, the halt, the sick, vagabonds and toilers, prisoners and paupers, the people of Ireland, England, Scotland, Wales, who have not enough to eat. And this, in face of the fact that five men can produce bread for a thousand; that one workman can produce cotton cloth for 250 people, woollens for 300, and boots and shoes for 1000. It would seem that 40,000,000 people are keeping a big house, and that they are keeping it badly. The income is all right, but there is something criminally wrong with the management. And who dares to say that it is not criminally mismanaged, this big house, when five men can produce bread for a thousand, and yet millions have not enough to eat?
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX.
Drink, Temperance, and Thrift.
Sometimes the poor are praised for being thrifty.
But to recommend thrift to the poor is both grotesque
and insulting. It is like advising a man who is
starving to eat less. For a town or country laborer to
practice thrift would be absolutely immoral. Man
should not be ready to show that he can live like a
badly-fed animal.
-OSCAR WILDE.
THE ENGLISH WORKING CLASSES may be said to be soaked in beer. They are made dull and sodden by it. Their efficiency is sadly impaired, and they lose whatever imagination, invention, and quickness may be theirs by right of race. It may hardly be called an acquired habit, for they are accustomed to it from their earliest infancy. Children are begotten in drunkenness, saturated in drink before they draw their first breath, born to the smell and taste of it, and brought up in the midst of it.
The public house is ubiquitous. It flourishes on every corner and between corners, and it is frequented almost as much by women as by men. Children are to be found in it as well, waiting till their fathers and mothers are ready to go home, sipping from the glasses of their elders, listening to the coarse language and degrading conversation, catching the contagion of it, familiarizing themselves with licentiousness and debauchery.
Mrs. Grundy rules as supremely over the workers as she does over the bourgeoisie; but in the case of the workers, the one thing she does not frown upon is the public house. No disgrace or shame attaches to it, nor to the young woman or girl who makes a practice of entering it.
I remember a girl in a coffee-house saying, ‘I never drink spirits when in a public ‘ouse.’ She was a young and pretty waitress, and she was laying down to another waitress her preeminent respectability and discretion. Mrs. Grundy drew the line at spirits, but allowed that it was quite proper for a clean young girl to drink beer and to go into a public house to drink it.
Not only is this beer unfit for the people to drink it, but too often the men and women are unfit to drink it. On the other hand, it is their very unfitness that drives them to drink it. Ill-fed, suffering from innutrition and the evil effects of overcrowding and squalor, their constitutions develop a morbid craving for the drink, just as the sickly stomach of the over-strung Manchester factory operative hankers after excessive quantities of pickles and similar weird foods. Unhealthy working and living engenders unhealthy appetites and desires. Man cannot be worked worse than a horse is worked, and be housed and fed as a pig is housed and fed, and at the same time have clean and wholesome ideals and aspirations.