CHAPTER XXVI--DRINK, TEMPERANCE, AND THRIFT
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, familiarising 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 pre-eminent
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, 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 overstrung 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.
As home-life vanishes, the public-house appears. Not only do men
and women abnormally crave drink, who are overworked, exhausted,
suffering from deranged stomachs and bad sanitation, and deadened by
the ugliness and monotony of existence, but the gregarious men and
women who have no home-life flee to the bright and clattering
public-house in a vain attempt to express their gregariousness. And
when a family is housed in one small room, home-life is impossible.
A brief examination of such a dwelling will serve to bring to light
one important cause of drunkenness. Here the family arises in the
morning, dresses, and makes its toilet, father, mother, sons, and
daughters, and in the same room, shoulder to shoulder (for the room
is small), the wife and mother cooks the breakfast. And in the same
room, heavy and sickening with the exhalations of their packed
bodies throughout the night, that breakfast is eaten. The father
goes to work, the elder children go to school or into the street,
and the mother remains with her crawling, toddling youngsters to do
her housework--still in the same room. Here she washes the clothes,
filling the pent space with soapsuds and the smell of dirty clothes,
and overhead she hangs the wet linen to dry.
Here, in the evening, amid the manifold smells of the day, the
family goes to its virtuous couch. That is to say, as many as
possible pile into the one bed (if bed they have), and the surplus
turns in on the floor. And this is the round of their existence,
month after month, year after year, for they never get a vacation
save when they are evicted. When a child dies, and some are always
bound to die, since fifty-five per cent. of the East End children
die before they are five years old, the body is laid out in the same
room. And if they are very poor, it is kept for some time until
they can bury it. During the day it lies on the bed; during the
night, when the living take the bed, the dead occupies the table,
from which, in the morning, when the dead is put back into the bed,
they eat their breakfast. Sometimes the body is placed on the shelf
which serves as a pantry for their food. Only a couple of weeks
ago, an East End woman was in trouble, because, in this fashion,
being unable to bury it, she had kept her dead child three weeks.
Now such a room as I have described is not home but horror; and the
men and women who flee away from it to the public-house are to be
pitied, not blamed. There are 300,000 people, in London, divided
into families that live in single rooms, while there are 900,000 who
are illegally housed according to the Public Health Act of 1891--a
respectable recruiting-ground for the drink traffic.
Then there are the insecurity of happiness, the precariousness of
existence, the well-founded fear of the future--potent factors in
driving people to drink. Wretchedness squirms for alleviation, and
in the public-house its pain is eased and forgetfulness is obtained.
It is unhealthy. Certainly it is, but everything else about their
lives is 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 realise 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, demonstrate 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 often 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 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 ninepence.
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 instant 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 21s. 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 cram yearnings for the Beautiful, and True, and Good down
the throat of the woman making violets for three farthings a gross,
but they will make somebody get off her back and quit cramming
himself till, like the Romans, he must go to a bath and sweat it
out. And to their consternation, they will find that they will have
to get off that woman's back themselves, as well as the backs of a
few other women and children they did not dream they were riding
upon.
