CHAPTER XXV--THE HUNGER WAIL
"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 12 pounds 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 italics 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 more 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 enormous army of 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--0.75 pint of skilly and dry bread.
Dinner --3 oz. meat.
1 slice of bread.
0.5 lb. potatoes.
Supper --0.75 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 Warder 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
recognised 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
3.25 oz. Meat 12 oz.
15.5 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."
Here is a table, comparing the workhouse officer's weekly
allowance:-
OFFICER DIET PAUPER
7 lb. Bread 6.75 lb.
5 lb. Meat 1 lb. 2 oz.
12 oz. Bacon 2.5 oz.
8 oz. Cheese 2 oz.
7 lb. Potatoes 1.5 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 and 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 labourer 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:-
s. d.
Bread (5 quarterns) 1 10
Flour (0.5 gallon) 0 4
Tea (0.25 lb.) 0 6
Butter (1 lb.) 1 3
Lard (1 lb.) 0 6
Sugar (6 lb.) 1 0
Bacon or other meat (about 0.25 lb.) 2 8
Cheese (1 lb.) 0 8
Milk (half-tin condensed) 0 3.25
Coal 1 6
Beer none
Tobacco none
Insurance ("Prudential") 0 3
Labourers' Union 0 1
Wood, tools, dispensary, &c. 0 6
Insurance ("Foresters") and margin 1 1.75
for clothes
Total 13 0
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 1.5
Women 5 6.5
Children 5 1.25
If the labourer whose budget has been described should quit his toil
and go into the workhouse, he would cost the guardians for
s. d.
Himself 6 1.5
Wife 5 6.5
Two children 10 2.5
Total 21 10.5
Or roughly, $5.46
It would require more than a guinea for the workhouse to care for
him and his family, which he, somehow, manages to do on thirteen
shillings. 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
decentralisation 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 decentralised 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?
