CHAPTER XXI--THE PRECARIOUSNESS OF LIFE
I was talking with a very vindictive man. In his opinion, his wife
had wronged him and the law had wronged him. The merits and morals
of the case are immaterial. The meat of the matter is that she had
obtained a separation, and he was compelled to pay ten shillings
each week for the support of her and the five children. "But look
you," said he to me, "wot'll 'appen to 'er if I don't py up the ten
shillings? S'posin', now, just s'posin' a accident 'appens to me,
so I cawn't work. S'posin' I get a rupture, or the rheumatics, or
the cholera. Wot's she goin' to do, eh? Wot's she goin' to do?"
He shook his head sadly. "No 'ope for 'er. The best she cawn do is
the work'ouse, an' that's 'ell. An' if she don't go to the
work'ouse, it'll be a worse 'ell. Come along 'ith me an' I'll show
you women sleepin' in a passage, a dozen of 'em. An' I'll show you
worse, wot she'll come to if anythin' 'appens to me and the ten
shillings."
The certitude of this man's forecast is worthy of consideration. He
knew conditions sufficiently to know the precariousness of his
wife's grasp on food and shelter. For her game was up when his
working capacity was impaired or destroyed. And when this state of
affairs is looked at in its larger aspect, the same will be found
true of hundreds of thousands and even millions of men and women
living amicably together and co-operating in the pursuit of food and
shelter.
The figures are appalling: 1,800,000 people in London live on the
poverty line and below it, and 1,000,000 live with one week's wages
between them and pauperism. In all England and Wales, eighteen per
cent. of the whole population are driven to the parish for relief,
and in London, according to the statistics of the London County
Council, twenty-one per cent. of the whole population are driven to
the parish for relief. Between being driven to the parish for
relief and being an out-and-out pauper there is a great difference,
yet London supports 123,000 paupers, quite a city of folk in
themselves. One in every four in London dies on public charity,
while 939 out of every 1000 in the United Kingdom die in poverty;
8,000,000 simply struggle on the ragged edge of starvation, and
20,000,000 more are not comfortable in the simple and clean sense of
the word.
It is interesting to go more into detail concerning the London
people who die on charity.
In 1886, and up to 1893, the percentage of pauperism to population
was less in London than in all England; but since 1893, and for
every succeeding year, the percentage of pauperism to population has
been greater in London than in all England. Yet, from the
Registrar-General's Report for 1886, the following figures are
taken:-
Out of 81,951 deaths in London (1884):-
In workhouses 9,909
In hospitals 6,559
In lunatic asylums 278
Total in public refuges 16,746
Commenting on these figures, a Fabian writer says: "Considering
that comparatively few of these are children, it is probable that
one in every three London adults will be driven into one of these
refuges to die, and the proportion in the case of the manual labour
class must of course be still larger."
These figures serve somewhat to indicate the proximity of the
average worker to pauperism. Various things make pauperism. An
advertisement, for instance, such as this, appearing in yesterday
morning's paper:-
"Clerk wanted, with knowledge of shorthand, typewriting, and
invoicing: wages ten shillings ($2.50) a week. Apply by letter,"
&c.
And in to-day's paper I read of a clerk, thirty-five years of age
and an inmate of a London workhouse, brought before a magistrate for
non-performance of task. He claimed that he had done his various
tasks since he had been an inmate; but when the master set him to
breaking stones, his hands blistered, and he could not finish the
task. He had never been used to an implement heavier than a pen, he
said. The magistrate sentenced him and his blistered hands to seven
days' hard labour.
Old age, of course, makes pauperism. And then there is the
accident, the thing happening, the death or disablement of the
husband, father, and bread-winner. Here is a man, with a wife and
three children, living on the ticklish security of twenty shillings
per week--and there are hundreds of thousands of such families in
London. Perforce, to even half exist, they must live up to the last
penny of it, so that a week's wages (one pound) is all that stands
between this family and pauperism or starvation. The thing happens,
the father is struck down, and what then? A mother with three
children can do little or nothing. Either she must hand her
children over to society as juvenile paupers, in order to be free to
do something adequate for herself, or she must go to the sweat-shops
for work which she can perform in the vile den possible to her
reduced income. But with the sweat-shops, married women who eke out
their husband's earnings, and single women who have but themselves
miserably to support, determine the scale of wages. And this scale
of wages, so determined, is so low that the mother and her three
children can live only in positive beastliness and semi-starvation,
till decay and death end their suffering.
To show that this mother, with her three children to support, cannot
compete in the sweating industries, I instance from the current
newspapers the two following cases:-
A father indignantly writes that his daughter and a girl companion
receive 8.5d. per gross for making boxes. They made each day four
gross. Their expenses were 8d. for car fare, 2d. for stamps, 2.5d.
for glue, and 1d. for string, so that all they earned between them
was 1s. 9d., or a daily wage each of 10.5d.
In the second ewe, before the Luton Guardians a few days ago, an old
woman of seventy-two appeared, asking for relief. "She was a straw-
hat maker, but had been compelled to give up the work owing to the
price she obtained for them--namely, 2.25d. each. For that price
she had to provide plait trimmings and make and finish the hats."
Yet this mother and her three children we are considering have done
no wrong that they should be so punished. They have not sinned.
The thing happened, that is all; the husband, father and bread-
winner, was struck down. There is no guarding against it. It is
fortuitous. A family stands so many chances of escaping the bottom
of the Abyss, and so many chances of falling plump down to it. The
chance is reducible to cold, pitiless figures, and a few of these
figures will not be out of place.
Sir A. Forwood calculates that -
1 of every 1400 workmen is killed annually.
1 of every 2500 workmen is totally disabled.
1 of every 300 workmen is permanently partially disabled.
1 of every 8 workmen is temporarily disabled 3 or 4 weeks.
But these are only the accidents of industry. The high mortality of
the people who live in the Ghetto plays a terrible part. The
average age at death among the people of the West End is fifty-five
years; the average age at death among the people of the East End is
thirty years. That is to say, the person in the West End has twice
the chance for life that the person has in the East End. Talk of
war! The mortality in South Africa and the Philippines fades away
to insignificance. Here, in the heart of peace, is where the blood
is being shed; and here not even the civilised rules of warfare
obtain, for the women and children and babes in the arms are killed
just as ferociously as the men are killed. War! In England, every
year, 500,000 men, women, and children, engaged in the various
industries, are killed and disabled, or are injured to disablement
by disease.
In the West End eighteen per cent. of the children die before five
years of age; in the East End fifty-five per cent. of the children
die before five years of age. And there are streets in London where
out of every one hundred children born in a year, fifty die during
the next year; and of the fifty that remain, twenty-five die before
they are five years old. Slaughter! Herod did not do quite so
badly.
That industry causes greater havoc with human life than battle does
no better substantiation can be given than the following extract
from a recent report of the Liverpool Medical Officer, which is not
applicable to Liverpool alone:-
In many instances little if any sunlight could get to the courts,
and the atmosphere within the dwellings was always foul, owing
largely to the saturated condition of the walls and ceilings, which
for so many years had absorbed the exhalations of the occupants into
their porous material. Singular testimony to the absence of
sunlight in these courts was furnished by the action of the Parks
and Gardens Committee, who desired to brighten the homes of the
poorest class by gifts of growing flowers and window-boxes; but
these gifts could not be made in courts such as these, AS FLOWERS
AND PLANTS WERE SUSCEPTIBLE TO THE UNWHOLESOME SURROUNDINGS, AND
WOULD NOT LIVE.
Mr. George Haw has compiled the following table on the three St.
George's parishes (London parishes):-
Percentage of
Population Death-rate
Overcrowded per 1000
St. George's West 10 13.2
St. George's South 35 23.7
St. George's East 40 26.4
Then there are the "dangerous trades," in which countless workers
are employed. Their hold on life is indeed precarious--far, far
more precarious than the hold of the twentieth-century soldier on
life. In the linen trade, in the preparation of the flax, wet feet
and wet clothes cause an unusual amount of bronchitis, pneumonia,
and severe rheumatism; while in the carding and spinning departments
the fine dust produces lung disease in the majority of cases, and
the woman who starts carding at seventeen or eighteen begins to
break up and go to pieces at thirty. The chemical labourers, picked
from the strongest and most splendidly-built men to be found, live,
on an average, less than forty-eight years.
Says Dr. Arlidge, of the potter's trade: "Potter's dust does not
kill suddenly, but settles, year after year, a little more firmly
into the lungs, until at length a case of plaster is formed.
Breathing becomes more and more difficult and depressed, and finally
ceases."
Steel dust, stone dust, clay dust, alkali dust, fluff dust, fibre
dust--all these things kill, and they are more deadly than machine-
guns and pom-poms. Worst of all is the lead dust in the white-lead
trades. Here is a description of the typical dissolution of a
young, healthy, well-developed girl who goes to work in a white-lead
factory:-
Here, after a varying degree of exposure, she becomes anaemic. It
may be that her gums show a very faint blue line, or perchance her
teeth and gums are perfectly sound, and no blue line is discernible.
Coincidently with the anaemia she has been getting thinner, but so
gradually as scarcely to impress itself upon her or her friends.
Sickness, however, ensues, and headaches, growing in intensity, are
developed. These are frequently attended by obscuration of vision
or temporary blindness. Such a girl passes into what appears to her
friends and medical adviser as ordinary hysteria. This gradually
deepens without warning, until she is suddenly seized with a
convulsion, beginning in one half of the face, then involving the
arm, next the leg of the same side of the body, until the
convulsion, violent and purely epileptic form in character, becomes
universal. This is attended by loss of consciousness, out of which
she passes into a series of convulsions, gradually increasing in
severity, in one of which she dies--or consciousness, partial or
perfect, is regained, either, it may be, for a few minutes, a few
hours, or days, during which violent headache is complained of, or
she is delirious and excited, as in acute mania, or dull and sullen
as in melancholia, and requires to be roused, when she is found
wandering, and her speech is somewhat imperfect. Without further
warning, save that the pulse, which has become soft, with nearly the
normal number of beats, all at once becomes low and hard; she is
suddenly seized with another convulsion, in which she dies, or
passes into a state of coma from which she never rallies. In
another case the convulsions will gradually subside, the headache
disappears and the patient recovers, only to find that she has
completely lost her eyesight, a loss that may be temporary or
permanent.
And here are a few specific cases of white-lead poisoning:-
Charlotte Rafferty, a fine, well-grown young woman with a splendid
constitution--who had never had a day's illness in her life--became
a white-lead worker. Convulsions seized her at the foot of the
ladder in the works. Dr. Oliver examined her, found the blue line
along her gums, which shows that the system is under the influence
of the lead. He knew that the convulsions would shortly return.
They did so, and she died.
Mary Ann Toler--a girl of seventeen, who had never had a fit in her
life--three times became ill, and had to leave off work in the
factory. Before she was nineteen she showed symptoms of lead
poisoning--had fits, frothed at the mouth, and died.
Mary A., an unusually vigorous woman, was able to work in the lead
factory for TWENTY YEARS, having colic once only during that time.
Her eight children all died in early infancy from convulsions. One
morning, whilst brushing her hair, this woman suddenly lost all
power in both her wrists.
Eliza H., aged twenty-five, AFTER FIVE MONTHS at lead works, was
seized with colic. She entered another factory (after being refused
by the first one) and worked on uninterruptedly for two years. Then
the former symptoms returned, she was seized with convulsions, and
died in two days of acute lead poisoning.
Mr. Vaughan Nash, speaking of the unborn generation, says: "The
children of the white-lead worker enter the world, as a rule, only
to die from the convulsions of lead poisoning--they are either born
prematurely, or die within the first year."
And, finally, let me instance the case of Harriet A. Walker, a young
girl of seventeen, killed while leading a forlorn hope on the
industrial battlefield. She was employed as an enamelled ware
brusher, wherein lead poisoning is encountered. Her father and
brother were both out of employment. She concealed her illness,
walked six miles a day to and from work, earned her seven or eight
shillings per week, and died, at seventeen.
Depression in trade also plays an important part in hurling the
workers into the Abyss. With a week's wages between a family and
pauperism, a month's enforced idleness means hardship and misery
almost indescribable, and from the ravages of which the victims do
not always recover when work is to be had again. Just now the daily
papers contain the report of a meeting of the Carlisle branch of the
Dockers' Union, wherein it is stated that many of the men, for
months past, have not averaged a weekly income of more than from
four to five shillings. The stagnated state of the shipping
industry in the port of London is held accountable for this
condition of affairs.
To the young working-man or working-woman, or married couple, there
is no assurance of happy or healthy middle life, nor of solvent old
age. Work as they will, they cannot make their future secure. It
is all a matter of chance. Everything depends upon the thing
happening, the thing with which they have nothing to do. Precaution
cannot fend it off, nor can wiles evade it. If they remain on the
industrial battlefield they must face it and take their chance
against heavy odds. Of course, if they are favourably made and are
not tied by kinship duties, they may run away from the industrial
battlefield. In which event the safest thing the man can do is to
join the army; and for the woman, possibly, to become a Red Cross
nurse or go into a nunnery. In either case they must forego home
and children and all that makes life worth living and old age other
than a nightmare.
