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unhealthy, while this brings the oblivion that nothing else in their lives can
bring. It even exalts them, and makes them feel that they are finer and
better, though at the same time it drags them down and makes them more beastly
than ever. For the unfortunate man or woman, it is a race between miseries
that ends with death.
It is of no avail to preach temperance and teetotalism to these people. The
drink habit may be the cause of many miseries; but it is, in turn, the effect
of other and prior miseries. The temperance advocates may preach their hearts
out over the evils of drink, but until the evils that cause people to drink
are abolished, drink and its evils will remain.
Until the people who try to help, realize this, their well-intentioned efforts
will be futile, and they will present a spectacle fit only to set Olympus
laughing. I have gone through an exhibition of Japanese art, got up for the
poor of Whitechapel with the idea of elevating them, of begetting in them
yearnings for the
Beautiful and True and Good. Granting (what is not so) that the poor folk are
thus taught to know and yearn after the Beautiful and True and Good, the foul
facts of their existence and the social law that dooms one in three to a
public-charity death, demonstrates that this knowledge and yearning will be
only so much of an added curse to them.
They will have so much more to forget than if they had never known and
yearned. Did Destiny to-day bind me down to the life of an East End slave for
the rest of my years, and did Destiny grant me but one wish, I should ask that
I might forget all about the Beautiful and True and Good; that I might forget
all I had learned from the open books, and forget the people I had known, the
things I had heard, and the lands I had seen. And if Destiny didn't grant it,
I am pretty confident that I should get drunk and forget it as of as possible.
These people who try to help! Their college settlements, missions, charities,
and what not, are failures. In the nature of things they cannot but be
failures. They are wrongly, though sincerely, conceived.
They approach life through a misunderstanding of life, these good folk. They
do not understand the West End, yet they come down to the
East End as teachers and savants. They do not understand the simple sociology
of Christ, yet they come to the miserable and the despised with the pomp of
social redeemers. They have worked faithfully, but beyond relieving an
infinitesimal fraction of misery and collecting a certain amount of data which
might otherwise have been more scientifically and less expensively collected,
they have achieved nothing.
As some one has said, they do everything for the poor except get off their
backs. The very money they dribble out in their child's schemes has been wrung
from the poor. They come from a race of successful and predatory bipeds who
stand between the worker and his wages, and they try to tell the worker what
he shall do with the pitiful balance left to him. Of what use, in the name of
God, is it to establish nurseries for women workers, in which, for instance, a
child is taken while the mother makes violets in Islington at three farthings
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a gross, when more children and violet-makers than they can cope with are
being born right along? This violet-maker handles each flower four times, 576
handlings for three farthings, and in the day she handles the flowers 6912
times for a wage of eighteen cents. She is being robbed. Somebody is on her
back, and a yearning for the Beautiful and True and Good will not lighten her
burden.
They do nothing for her, these dabblers; and what they do not do for the
mother, undoes at night, when the child comes home, all that they have done
for the child in the day.
And one and all, they join in teaching a fundamental lie. They do not know it
is a lie, but their ignorance does not make it more of a truth. And the lie
they preach is 'thrift.' An instance will demonstrate it. In overcrowded
London, the struggle for a chance to work is keen, and because of this
struggle wages sink to the lowest means of subsistence. To be thrifty means
for a worker to spend less than his income- in other words, to live on less.
This is equivalent to a lowering of the standard of living. In the competition
for a chance to work, the man with a lower standard of living will underbid
the man with a higher standard. And a small group of such thrifty workers in
any overcrowded industry will permanently lower the wages of that industry.
And the thrifty ones will no longer be thrifty, for their income will have
been reduced till it balances
their expenditure.
In short, thrift negates thrift. If every worker in England should heed the
preachers of thrift and cut expenditure in half, the condition of there being
more men to work than there is work to do would swiftly cut wages in half. And
then none of the workers of
England would be thrifty, for they would be living up to their diminished
incomes. The short-sighted thrift-preachers would naturally be astounded at
the outcome. The measure of their failure would be precisely the measure of
the success of their propaganda. And, anyway, it is sheer bosh and nonsense to
preach thrift to the 1,800,000 London workers who are divided into families
which have a total income of less than $5.25 per week, one-quarter to one-half
of which must be paid for rent.
Concerning the futility of the people who try to help, I wish to make one
notable, noble exception, namely, the Dr. Barnardo Homes. Dr.
Barnardo is a child-catcher. First, he catches them when they are young,
before they are set, hardened, in the vicious social mould; and then he sends
them away to grow up and be formed in another and better social mould. Up to
date he has sent out of the country 13,340 boys, most of them to Canada, and
not one in fifty has failed. A splendid record, when it is considered that
these lads are waifs and strays, homeless and parentless, jerked out from the
very bottom of the Abyss, and forty-nine out of fifty of them made into men.
Every twenty-four hours in the year Dr. Barnardo snatches nine waifs from the
streets; so the enormous field he has to work in may be comprehended. The
people who try to help have something to learn from him. He does not play with
palliatives. He traces social viciousness and misery to their sources. He
removes the progeny of the gutter-folk from their pestilential environment,
and gives them a healthy, wholesome environment in which to be pressed and
prodded and moulded into men.
When the people who try to help cease their playing and dabbling with day
nurseries and Japanese art exhibits, and go back and learn their West End and
the sociology of Christ, they will be in better shape to buckle down to the
work they ought to be doing in the world. And if they do buckle down to the
work, they will follow Dr.
Barnardo's lead, only on a scale as large as the nation is large. They won't
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