SEVEN YEARS' HARD BY RICHARD FREE M AUTHOR OF S< A CRY FROM THE DARKNESS ' " I spoke as I saw." NEW YORK E. P. BUTTON & COMPANY 1905 All rights reset ved ,l> Printed in Great Britain SEVEN YEARS' HARD 255110 TO MY BROTHER Hard-handed Brother, stunted and warped with toil, Thy stolid face, thy dull, unseeing eyes, Thy lips too stern and shut for moans or sighs, Thy very flesh defiled with daily moil Fill me with shame and pity. Son of the soil, Helpless and hopeless, spent in the scuffle of life, Thou, with thy little ones and the pale, patient wife, What's left to thee but the submissive smile That glows, like the last flash of dying day, Kindly but coldly, rare and yet ever rarer ? " Let be ! " thou criest. " Say that I pinch to pay The weekly rent, the cupboard growing barer, My belly emptier why, what's the odds ? " And thus thy great calm soul is one with God's. The author begs to acknowledge the courtesy of Messrs. Francis Day, and Hunter, for their kind permission in allowing him to quote the words of the songs marked with an asterisk in Chapter VI., and to Messrs. Charles Sheard and Co., Messrs. Feldham, Bertram and Co., the Proprietors of the News of the World, and Mr. Richard F. W. Maynard, for the others that are quoted. CONTENTS PAGE A WORD TO THE READER ..... ........ ix PROLOGUE ..................... xiii CHAPTER I A CITY OF DESOLATION CHAPTER II THE CHILDREN OF THE EAST 28 CHAPTER III VICES , 57 CHAPTER IV VIRTUES 83 CHAPTER V LIMITATIONS IO9 CHAPTER VI RECREATIONS 132 CHAPTER VII WORK AND WAGE . l6l viii CONTENTS CHAPTER VIII PAGE THE PROBLEM OF THE ROOF-TREE 1 86 CHAPTER IX SOUP-TICKET PHILANTHROPY 2O6 CHAPTER X CHRISTIANITY A FAILURE 238 EPILOGUE 258 A WORD TO THE READER THIS book is a human document. It professes to be no more ; it claims to be no less. The persons who figure in it are living, breathing realities, not creations of pen and inkpot. The experiences recorded in it are history, not myth, and have been cast into mould piping- hot from the memory. Being a simple record of fact, this book seeks neither to flatter nor to disparage. Therefore, parts of it may be found unpalatable ; while other parts, let us hope, will be found palatable. The mixture should surprise no one. Human life is made up in that way, simply because human life is fact and not fiction. I have not written a novel, but a history. I believe experience is given us to be used. I believe that facts have their lessons, even for the humblest. In so far as facts are faithfully recorded, they are valuable. They are valueless only when they are glossed over or misrepresented. It is certain that false inferences may be drawn from true facts ; it is equally certain that the facts remain. They are "stubborn things," very x A WORD TO THE READER tenacious of life ; and, one day, they will inevitably yield their secret. Meantime, the most that any of us can do is to gather them, question them, and honestly tell the world what we believe to be their answers. In this book I have used the terms " East End," " East-ender " in the accepted sense. Let any reader who finds himself at variance with statements regarding the one or the other, remember that "the exception proves the rule." No one is more alive than I to the fact that some of the East End is \Vest End in all but name, even as many West-enders may be East-enders at heart. But for the practical purpose in hand the words must connote specific qualities, and no connotation could be better, or more generally accurate, than the popular one. This book has been put together in odd moments of a busy life. Chapters of it have been written at the fag- ends of laborious days ; paragraphs, and even single sentences of it, have been violently sandwiched between preaching and scrubbing, choir-training and sing-song dancing-classes and prayers for the dying. Moreover, it has not been compiled in that sweet solitude so dear to the literary expert. The smells of fried fish, boiling soap, and stewing cocoanuts have been aggressively obvious ; the cries and screams of children, filled with the wild joy of life or its wilder pain, have formed a kind of running accompaniment to my theme ; while my auditory nerve has been kept painfully alert by the piano-organist, the vendor of shrimps, the muffin-man, A WORD TO THE READER xi the seller of songs (vocally illustrated), the gentleman in drink, and the lady in a passion. But why have I had to endure the unspeakable conversation of certain persons who shall be nameless, and who, I feel sure, did not mean to be objectionable, but were ? And, in its usual parrot-fashion, echo answers, " Why ? " PROLOGUE " I AM tired of preaching to silks and satins," I said ; " rags and tatters would be a welcome change." The Bishop lifted grave, kind eyes, in which lurked more than a suspicion of amusement. " I see. The conventionality of civilised society palls on you ; you want something more " " Real ! " I cried with conviction. The word gave me a feeling of bodily and mental vigour such as I had not known for many a long month. " Real ! That's it. I want to get at the foundation of things, to see human nature without its paint and gew-gaws ; I want to face up to it, understand it, learn my lesson from it." Looking back over the seven years that have passed since these words were uttered, it seems to me that I was very young then ; and it also seems to me, as I write, that I am quite old now. For, if experience ages us, then twenty years have passed since that memorable day on which I sat in a dim little study in the heart of the City, and gazed on the scholarly face of George Forrest Browne, Bishop of Stepney. The suspicion of amusement in the Bishop's eyes xiv PROLOGUE deepened. He paused awhile, as if weighing something in his mind. Then he said, with the peculiar force and directness so characteristic of him " You want an unconventional sphere of labour ; you can have it. You want to see human nature in its primitive condition ; your wish can be gratified. At this very moment I need a man for pioneering missionary work. It will be rough ; it will be hard ; it will be dis- couraging. There is no house to live in ; there is no church to worship in ; there is no endowment, or fund, or anything of that kind to draw upon for working expenses. I think I can secure you a stipend of 150 a year, and I know I can put my hand on money for building purposes. Well ? " I began to feel somewhat uncomfortable. The study suddenly grew gloomy, the air chilly. The Bishop spoke again " Of course, you know the Isle of Dogs ? " Yes. At least, I had heard of the Isle of Dogs. To tell truth, a vision of flannels, a light outrigger, broiling summer sun, and a purling stream emerged from some- where at the back of my mind, recalling halcyon days of another period. "Yes, I may say I know it," I continued eagerly. " Up river ? Twickenham way ? " Back went the Bishop's head, as that lurking suspicion of a smile broke at last into audible laughter. " Oh dear, no ! Miles away from Twickenham and all that Twickenham means. Nothing so attractive, I PROLOGUE xv assure you. Limehouse ! Millwall ! That's much nearer the mark." I sat still. It was rather sudden. " Limehouse " con- jured up a picture of an impure stream bounded by dirty streets ; " Millwall " suggested river mud and long levels of decaying vegetation. The Twickenham picture was blotted out. " Well ? " The Bishop looked at me keenly. " I'll go." At that moment I was conscious of something like a call. I realised that this thing had come to me uninvited, unexpected. I wanted work ; work presented itself. Not, it is true, in the way I had anticipated, but perhaps in a far better way. Another Will than mine seemed to be in the business. and cranks, and wanton wiles," as in " Nod, and becks, and wreathed smiles." That is to say, he is fun-loving as well as amiable. His capacity for fun is enormous ; sometimes manifest- ing itself in sheer waggishness, at other times in the driest of dry banter, again in pungent and even delicate wit. Rarely is his smartness cruel. When it is so, it is jagged rather than keen. It does not cut ; it tears. His wit is easy and refreshingly original. Also, which is a great thing, it is without fear. Our maid Mylie was a wag quite of the first class. " Master's going about like a wet week," was her free- and-easy commentary on my appearance during an attack of the " blues." " He gave me a look like a summons," said she, referring to the facial contortions of the baker when she denounced his bread as half-baked. " Don't hang your clothes on the floor," she remarked, as the immaculate overcoat of a visitor slid off the hall- table where he had placed it. The children used to worry Mylie considerably. She VIRTUES 85 was always threatening them with the direst punishment if they did not desist from staring at her when she was at work. " Little miserables ! " she would cry, with withering scorn. " What are you looking at ? Do you think I'm a penny show ? Be off with you, or I'll give you what Paddy gave the drum." Occasionally she would exhibit a tendency to topsy- turvy humour of a somewhat trying kind. She over- slept herself one morning, and remarked on the unusual occurrence, " The milkman woke me, bawling out, or I should 'a' been down before." There is a mental entangle- ment about that statement which defies unravelling. But for sly and, at the same time, keen humour com- mend me to the factory girl. " I can't make it out," observed a member of the Hopeful Club, wrinkling her brows and biting her lips in mental travail. " Make what out ? " asked Miss Sackerby. A merry twinkle shot from the girl's eyes. " I can't make out why the only laidies as comes 'ere are men- 'aters, widders, and old maids." It was found necessary to eject a damsel from the club for bad behaviour. When she got to the door, she screamed out at the top of her voice, " No wonder you laidies can dress as you do ! Where does all our 'a' pennies go to ? That's wot I want to know. I call it a beastly shaime ! " And with a defiant flourish of her draggled skirts, she flung out of the room. It is interesting to observe, at times, the struggle between the natural kind-heartedness of the East-ender and his keen sense of what is fit and proper. One of my colleagues used to preach sermons that were very pro- tracted. " A nice gentleman," was the criticism passed \ 86 SEVEN YEARS' HARD on him by a devout hearer. " A very nice gentleman indeed ; but " with a reminiscent sigh " he do 'ang it out so long" Rascality is not averse to an occasional " quip." Dr. Family was called in to see a wretched woman in the last stages of disease and dirt. Two days later the poor creature died. At the inquest the coroner censured her husband for gross neglect. The fellow lowered his eyes guiltily, shifted uneasily from one foot to the other, seemed to be hunting about unsuccessfully for the " any excuse " that is " better than none," and finally murmured, " I'm very, very sorry, sir ; and it shall never occur again " ! We have all met, at some time or other, the pious beggar who was eloquent in his assurances that our bounty towards him would not be forgotten at Head- quarters, and made no effort to reimburse us himself. But I think young Morsey's jeu d'esprit would take a lot of beating. He owed money to a woman who had been very good to him, but he could not see his way to settling the debt ; so it was agreed that things should remain as they were until his worldly prospects were improved an extremely unlikely contingency, by-the- by. Young Morsey was deeply affected by his friend's kindness ; but surely it was with his tongue in his cheek that he wrote to her : " I cannot tell you how touched I am by your generosity ; and if the Lord don't pay you back, I will." Sapper's humour was peculiar to Sapper. A gaunt, sinewy man was Sammy, as he was affectionately called, short of stature, of any age between thirty and sixty, hollow of cheek, mild of eye, with a Saturday morning chin as bristly as a scrubbing-brush, and a pair of spectacles which never yet sat straight on his nose. I VIRTUES 87 am sure that no man born of woman was ever quite like him. He was distinctive ; and so was his humour. Commenting on the manifold virtues and infirmities of a young friend of his, he observed, as he gazed at me through his spectacles all askew, " Yes, sir, the boiy's of very weak intellect and he reads the Bible every day." " The boiy," he said on another occasion, referring to the same youngster, " belongs to the Band of Hope and the Sunday School and I don't think he'll ever be ]good for much." He was loyal as love, was Sapper. Rivalry in church matters suffocated him. That anybody should presume to do what we at St. Cuthbert's declined to do, or could not do, filled him with wondering contempt. One day he told me about an East End parson who, with the help of unlimited tea, was drawing hundreds of working-men to his services. I was deeply impressed. " And what proportion are really won for Christian- ity?" I asked. The ghost of a smile flickered over Sapper's thin brown face as he replied, "Before we answer that question, I think we had better wait until the tea-party is over." The quaint and curious sayings of the East End youngster would fill a volume. Ask a Millwall lad if he would like to go to the seaside, and, ten chances to one, his answer will be, " Seaside ? Not me ! I'd rather have a penn'orth o' Seabreeze off a whelk-stall." Coming out of church one summer evening, I was greeted with a shout of derision from half-a-dozen youngsters : " You think yourself a religious man, but you're not. No, no, no ! Oh dear, no ! " Such apparent rudeness I take to be merely love of chaff. It is not 88 SEVEN YEARS' HARD really meant ; or, at any rate, it is not meant much. Surely the sobriquet of " Dicky Free," which I acquired soon after my advent to Millwall, may have been originally spoken with some contempt ; but the same words a year or two later connoted affection of a very real kind. Where to go to for our summer excursion was a problem which claimed our attention for long weeks before the appointed day. Sophie once suggested the Zoo. "But they'd keep you there," quietly observed a choir boy. On a bitter evening in the winter of 1897 the Rev. J. H. A. Law, the genial Secretary of the Church of England Temperance Society, formally inaugurated our Band of Hope work. I was in the chair. The east wind had played havoc with my features generally, and with the most prominent feature of my face in particu- lar ; and I devoutly hoped that, for once, the argument ad rent would be omitted. What was my horror when Mr. Law, in his most impressive manner, observed, " Now, children, whenever you see a man with a red nose, what does it mean ? " There was not a moment's hesitation. A hundred pairs of eyes were turned upon me like a hundred pairs of searchlights alive with human waggishness ; and a hundred voices shouted as one " Drink ! " Can the reader dimly imagine what it is to live in daily contact with such supernaturally sharp mites ? Leda Chaud was Nina's bete noir. Leda gave herself airs because her uncle was an undertaker. She was one of those persons who " shake hands with you like that," VIRTUES 89 as Grossmith used to sing at the Savoy ; that is to say, she would lift your hand high in the air as if under the impression that it was an interesting physiological specimen, and let it drop flop as though convinced, on inspection, that it was not. The child was undeniably snobbish ; and Nina, being a true East-ender, hated snobbery like the devil. One day, Leda arrived weighted down with a notable piece of news : she had discovered that I was not a gentleman, nor my wife a lady. Nina shrugged, and cast about for a rejoinder. " How do you know ? " she said at length, rather lamely. " Because no gentleman or lady would live in such a place as Millwall," said Leda. " And, besides," she added nimbly, as Nina was about to crush her with the retort obvious, "my Aunt Priscilla is a lady, and she associates with earls." The breach in Leda's armour yawned* Nina had no pity. Like a flash she thrust home through flesh and bone "If your aunt was a real lady, she'd associate with countesses, not with earls." It was a repartee worthy of Dr. Johnson. For pure facetiousness the following instances are worth chronicling. Before St. Cuthbert's was built we were obliged, as I have said, to hold the lads' club in our house. At that time the club's " properties " consisted of a dozen chairs or so and a few dog-eared picture-books. Jim Tristram was monitor. His duty was to see that the chairs were ranged around the wall, and that the books were within easy reach. One evening I arrived at the club rather late. Jim met me on the threshold. 90 SEVEN YEARS' HARD " Hullo ! " I cried. " Everything ready ? " "Yus, everything. On'y there's no books and no chairs." " Remember that Jesus counts your mother's tears when you are naughty," said Mrs. Free, impressively. " Please, miss," interrupted Keddon, " does He count the naughty boy's tears wen 'e's walloped?" " And then all the locusts disappeared," observed Molly, one of my home-grown Sunday School teachers, concluding an edifying lesson on the Ten Plagues. " They went like magic. Now where did they go ? Yes, Walter?" " John the Baptist ate 'em," answered the eight-year- older, with a grin that set the class in a roar. " Muwer, the baby wants yer," wailed Adelina's youngest but one, and kept on in a dirge-like tone until my nerves began to tingle warningly, " Muwer, the baby wants yer." But Adelina was negotiating a little matter at the " Dockers' Arms," with Goggles, her familiar, and could not be disturbed for love, although she might have been for money. The minutes passed, the doleful chant con- tinuing without intermission " Muv-ver ! The ba-aby wants yer." Suddenly Adelina appeared, her youth renewed like the eagle's. " Muv-ver ! " shrieked the youngest but one, " the ba " " Oh, well ! Wot does 'e want ? " cried Adelina, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. " Anybody 'd think 'e'd committed a serious crime, by the fuss you're makin'." Next to his humour I should say that the East-ender's VIRTUES 91 most striking virtue is his affectionate clannishness. He will do anything for his own. Is a woman sick ? There will be no lack of willing hands to help with the children and look after the husband. Is a neighbour " badly off," which in East End vernacular means starving? Somebody's pocket is always full enough to spare a copper or two. It is not unusual for a whole street to subscribe to a present in money for a decent man or woman unusually down on their luck ; and the " friendly lead " for a poor fellow who has met with an accident, or is otherwise hors de combat, is an established institution. I know a dear white-haired old body, very poor, very worried, and often very hungry, who for six years has cared for a woman casually thrown across her path, tending her in sickness, sharing a crust with her in health, for sheer love, without money and without price. Stoneham was dying of wasting sickness. He had no wife ; his children were too young to nurse him. One day Mrs. Glossop, a quiet, mild-eyed, reserved sort of woman, dropped in, as it were casually, and took the reins of government. She washed and mothered the children, tidied up the place, and tended and comforted the sick man. Day and night she stuck to her self-imposed task. She had a husband and children of her own, and her cup of sorrow was fuller than most people's. I marvelled at her abnegation. One day she explained the matter to me. " You see," she said, steadily regard- ing me out of those mild eyes of hers, "you see, Mr. Free, 'e ain't got no wife, an' there's no one 'ere to 'elp 'im if I don't. Wot's more, my sweetheart's on'y too glad for me to do it, and 'e's ready at any time to 92 SEVEN YEARS' HARD give a 'and when the pore feller wants movin', an' so on." And these are the people to whom we presume to teach religion ! Take that much-misunderstood creature, the factory girl. Under her rough exterior the heart of a woman beats high with love, if not with hope. It is true that she is a girl to be feared. That familiar terrible yell of hers, that screech of laughter with which she greets the well-dressed stranger, are almost demoniacal. But the yell and the screech are not all of her. Somewhere hidden away from our ken is her better nature. Her pity, her tenderness, her mercy are unequalled. Night after night, although working like a slave through the day, she will sit up with a sick mate, even putting aside out of her scanty earnings a daily portion for her friend's nourishment. One of my communicants is a good soul who works at a factory for a weekly wage of nine shillings. Hearing that she was often pinched for food and firing, I resolved to give her a pension of sixpence a week. A ridiculously small sum, the reader will think. But only those who live in intimate knowledge of the poor can possibly realise what sixpence a week means in the hands of a thrifty body. Well, Miss Theobald that is the dear woman's name gratefully accepted the pension, and I thought all was ended. In a week or two, however, came one of my visitors with a curious story. Miss Theobald " felt it on her conscience " that she ought not to have accepted the pension, when so many others for example, Mrs. Shillishall were so much more in want of it than she. Would I kindly transfer it? I pooh-poohed the idea. I said it was VIRTUES 93 nonsensical, sentimental. I invented some very hard names for it. Followed another message, and then another ; finally, shoals of messages. Literally bom- barded, I had to surrender. "You know," said Miss Theobald, when next we met, " I'm not badly off, am I ? not really and truly ? It's nine shillings every week, you know, reg'lar. That's where it's so good it's reg'lar." Yet such splendid disinterestedness the East-ender reserves for " his own " ; we " others " may claim no part or lot in it. As the stranger may not look for confi- dence, so he must not expect kindness. If he would secure either boon, he must become naturalised by living, during a space of years, in the midst of these people. Once he has gained their affection, the rest will be found easy. His interests will be protected with a jealous watchfulness that reminds one of nothing so much as a mother's care for her offspring. During my summer holidays I have again and again left my house entirely unprotected. I have made no request that it should be guarded, yet vigilant eyes have covered it by day and by night ; and woe betide any intruder who should venture to try a bit of housebreaking on his own account ! The confidence of the East-ender is a very precious thing when you get it, but it takes a great deal of getting. The well-known independence of the East-ender has much to do with this realisation of kinship. He may have little individuality, but the sense of brotherhood is strong within him. I have known several cases of young people, as well as old, who have been kept off the rates by the generosity of their neighbours ; and as for those who, time out of mind, would have gone to bed 94 SEVEN YEARS 1 HARD hungry but for the bite and sup offered them by the " lady over the way " or " the person at number four," well, their name is legion. Consequently begging, as ordi- narily understood, is unknown, is indeed inconceivable, in the East End ; and complete immunity is enjoyed from the gentlemanly impostor so familiar to the West End clergy, who poses as an officer, a doctor or an author. Of course, there are cases of direct begging, chiefly through the medium of children who are carefully posted up ad hoc, but the results are not always such as to warrant a repetition of the experiment. Scupper's chubby youngster once came to me with a pitiful story. " Nuffin' to eat since yest'y," he said, gulping down his sobs. " Work ? Yes, farver's in work, but 'e come 'ome drunk las' night wiv all 'is money gorn." Scupper's chubby youngster returned home empty-handed. " Wot did you say ? " screamed his mother. " I said as 'ow we 'adn't 'ad nuffin' to eat 'cause farver got drunk, and " Scupper's chubby youngster found it difficult to sit down for forty-eight hours. But such cases are exceptional. As a rule the East- ender, man, woman or child, is too noble-minded to beg ; and the vast majority of breaches of the rule are directly traceable to the abominable traffic in morals which we have permitted under the guise of philan- thropy. It is this same independence of spirit which prevents the self-respecting toiler from flaunting his troubles before a gaping public. To the casual visitor to the East End, the little houses, the quaint shops, the busy thorough- fares convey a sense of robust prosperity ; but those VIRTUES 95 who make their home there could tell many a tale of mute suffering, could point to many a home kept together by dint of incredible self-sacrifice. I shall never forget the quite royal pluck and pride of the wife of a working-man friend of mine. It was in the dog-days of 1904. My friend had been "put off," and funds had fallen to zero. Every morning, for five unspeakable weeks, this man rose very early and started forth on his interminable search for a job, only to return home every evening, sick and heart-broken with failure. The cup- board got barer and barer. One by one the bits and bobs of furniture, which had been acquired in the days of prosperity, disappeared : the deep basket-chair in which the man loved to stretch himself when smoking his evening pipe ; the cheap and gaudy little clock that ticked away at a furious rate with a face of serenest calm ; the one or two precious heirlooms that spoke with mute eloquence of the prosperous farmhouse on the Yorkshire moors a silver spoon thin as paper, an ancient brass snuff-box that shone like gold, and so on. The day came, and soon came, when every available article had found its way to the pawnshop, never to be redeemed but in imagination. Then the woman, with stern, set lips, made her resolution. On a stifling morning in July, she took her two youngest children, the one on her arm, the other by the hand, and started for Paddington and the Hampshire fruit-farms. " I must share the burden," she said to her husband. " You can face the world better with three than with six. Look you after those ; God helping me, I will look after these." In sixty seconds she could have sent me word that she was starving, and in ten minutes she should have had all she needed. But her pride said her nay. She reeled with hunger as she 96 SEVEN YEARS' HARD started with her bairns in the still morning. Twice on the way she nearly fainted ; every few hundred yards she was fain to sit down on a friendly doorstep and rest. And throughout that terrible journey, over miles of flagstones and across innumerable streets, she never condescended to ask for a penny. It was silly ; it was ridiculous ; it was almost criminal what shall I say ? It was magnificent. Ultra-independence of the kind has its amusing aspects. For instance, our friend Sapper's notion of the object of a sick club is positively uncanny. One night he came to me complaining of his head. He looked wretchedly ill. " Have you seen a doctor ? " I naturally asked. " No, that I haven't, sir." (He was the first and about the only person in Millwall who ever called me " sir," and I never really got used to it) " But you've got your club doctor ? " I remonstrated. " Oh, yes, I've got my club doctor right enough, and a varry nice gentleman he is, too. I've paid for my club doctor for many a long year." " Then why not go to him now you're feeling ill ? " " Well, sir, it's like this : I don't like to trouble the gentleman." " Stuff and nonsense ! ' Trouble the gentleman,' indeed ! Why, it's his duty to look after you." " No, I don't like to trouble him," repeated Sapper, meditatively scratching his ear. " If I was to see him, I know he would do me good. But I'm not the man to impose on him that's how it is." " You mean to tell me ? " I began, incredulously. " I mean to tell you, sir," he interrupted, with dignity, VIRTUES 97 " that I've only applied to my club doctor twice in twenty years." Such independence is not easily distinguishable from stubbornness ; and, truth to tell, the East End abounds in examples of obstinacy of that extreme kind. Our maid Cassandra, for instance, was incarnate perversity. When she dusted my study table, she would invariably place the inkstand on my right hand instead of in front of me. In itself that was an insignificant variation on the normal arrangement ; but it confused me, and I frequently found myself dipping the pen into empty air. So, every morning, I religiously restored the inkstand to its ordinary position. Every evening, Cassandra quite as religiously moved it back again. At last, losing all patience, I summoned the girl. " What do you mean by persistently moving the inkstand out of its place ? " " I likes it better there," said Cassandra. Talking of maidservants reminds me of the quite imperturbable independence of Mylie. Slasher, the millionaire, called on me one day on business. As a matter of fact, he had come to tell me what he thought of me, and was bursting with his message. In his agitation he neglected to put the door-mat to its proper use. Mylie surveyed him through her spectacles with the utmost astonishment. For once she was speechless. Not until Slasher was half-way upstairs did she recover herself. Then she made up for lost time. " 'Ere, you ! " she cried, " we're not a.c-cust-omed in this 'ere 'ouse to 'avin' people walkin' the mud all over the place. You jest come back and wipe your feet, please." The great man turned with a scowl, caught a danger- ous flash in Mylie's black eyes, hesitated, stopped came back and did as he was told, like a good little boy. H 9 8 SEVEN YEARS* HARD Mylie intended no offence. It was merely her East End independent way. Such independence occasionally assumes the most extraordinary forms. It was my prac- tice on Whit-Monday, for example, to take my choir to a friend's house to tea. Before sitting down to table, we were accustomed to retire to the scullery for a wash and brush-up. " Shall I leave my coat here ? " asked Darwin, on one occasion, when he had finished his ablutions. " Certainly," I answered, supposing that he referred to his overcoat. Something distracted me for the moment. The next thing I was conscious of was the lad sitting at the tea-table in his shirt-sleeves. " Bill ! " I shouted (in a whisper), " what on earth are you doing ? Come here ! " The boy followed me into the scullery with his usual mystified expression considerably deepened. " What's wrong ? " he asked. " Not go into tea without my jacket ? Why, we never put on our jackets at 'ome." At that moment, Cory, who was fourteen, and knew everything, swaggered in. " Hullo ! " he cried, catching sight of Darwin in the act of resuming his discarded garment. " What are you up to, you donkey ? You don't suppose you're goin' in to tea with your jacket on, do you ? " " I am that" Darwin declared, with the assurance of conscious rectitude ; " it's the fashion 'ere." " Who are you gittin' at ? " retorted Cory, with exceed- ing scorn. " Don't you think I know ? " Independence of the kind is apt to stagger the stranger. On the very first Christmas Day I spent in the East End, I received a considerable shock to my susceptibilities. At the close of the morning service, VIRTUES 99 according to my invariable custom elsewhere, I wished the congregation " A Merry Christmas ! " Other con- gregations had always received this expression of good- will with stolid indifference or mild astonishment, occasionally accompanied by a liberal use of the lorgnette. Not so with these delightfully original people. The words had scarcely passed my lips, when the unexpected response burst forth, " Same to you, Mr. Free ! And many of 'em !" What more natural? Therein lies the charm of the East-ender. He is so guileless and, therefore, so unconventional. One day, Rivoli walked into church in the middle of the service with his hat on and his jacket off. He was surprised, and rather hurt, when the breach of etiquette was pointed out to him. He "didn't mean no harm, he was sure." No, he didn't mean " no harm " ; his action was the natural result of his independent upbringing. Too much ceremony is not considered the thing. More than a mere sotip$on of the quality is regarded as unbecoming. Sometimes, indeed, the remotest flavour of it is deemed unnecessary. I discovered this characteristic in the winter of 1889, when I invited our people to meet the present Bishop of London, then Bishop of Stepney, at an evening party. For a whole week we did not receive a single answer to our invita- tions. My wife was nervous. I assured her that it was all right, reminding her that we were still three weeks from the eventful night. Another week passed still no answers. Then I began to get scared myself. When a third week had slowly drifted after the other two, and there was no sign whatever from the three hundred, I really grew alarmed. My wife was almost in tears. " What does it mean ? " she cried. " Is nobody H 2 TOO SEVEN YEARS' HARD coming? Or, if they are coming without letting me know, how am I to cater for them ? " At the eleventh hour, light came. I was fingering one of the invitation cards, when my eye fell on four letters. " Good heavens ! " I exclaimed. " That explains it." " What explains what ? " " ' R.S.V.P. ' ! " The cloud of a great fear, quickly followed by a burst of sunlit hope, broke over my wife's face. She laughed. " Well, if that's all, it's easily remedied." " How, pray ? " " By translating." " You think I'm going to these good folk ? " I began ; but indignation choked me. Turning on my heel, I swung out of the room. Within twenty-four hours two unexpected opportuni- ties of explanation presented themselves. Young Jack Fratter broke the ice, and Rivers carted it away, as it were. Jack had been having a hot argument with Tollawag, and on my arrival for the choir practice I was greeted with a torrent of questions " What about them cards ? " " Is Tollawag right ? " " It don't mean that, do it ? " " What does it mean ? " I tried to look cool and collected. " Do you refer to the invitation cards ? " I asked. There was a chorus of eager " Yeses," as the boys crowded round me. " Don't you understand what they mean ? " A doleful chorus of " Noes " carried conviction. " They are invitations to a party." " A party ! ' murmured Tollawag, the hot blood mounting to his temples. VIRTUES " There you are ! I told you so ! " said Jack. " You would 'ave as it was " " What ? " I asked, encouragingly. " The three-hours' service ! " cried the boy, fixing the flushed and discomforted Tollawag with an unutterable look. Next day, Rivers stopped me in the street. " I haven't answered the note yet," he burst out, spasmodically, " because because to tell you the truth, because " I broke in on his stammering speech with rude but saving power, and in twenty seconds had explained matters to his satisfaction. It was a most successful evening. The genial Bishop was at his very best, and put everyone at ease. " All your own people, Free?" he asked, looking with some astonishment at the crowded hall. " All my own people," I assured him, proudly. " Let us walk round," he said. I introduced several people to him, and all went well for a time. Then came an unexpected hiatus. " And this ? " said the smiling Bishop, extending his hand to a rosy-cheeked damsel. Horror ! The young woman was a perfect stranger to me. Searching despairingly for help, I caught Tallboy's eye. He must have inter- preted my look in the light of a challenge. " My wife couldn't come, so I brought my upstairs lodger," he explained, unabashed. I hurried the Bishop away, but only to jump out of the frying-pan into the fire. Baxter stood radiant in the midst of a blushing circle of femininity. The Bishop seemed to suspect something. He looked sideways at me. I shook my head sorrowfully. There was an 102 SEVEN YEARS' HARD awkward pause. But Baxter was equal to the occasion. With a comprehensive wave of the hand, he introduced the unknown ladies " Mrs. Plasher and the four Miss Flashers, from Wapping ! They were not invited ; but I knew Mr. Free would only be too " There were many more surprises before Dr. Win- nington-Ingram and I had finished the circuit of the room ; but we will draw a veil over the amazement of it all. Suffice it to say that the sundry young ladies of sundry young gentlemen came on the strength of the tender relationship ; that two youths who could not produce a single scrap of an invitation between them declined to take the hint to retire, and remained in unabashed enjoyment of the proceedings during the whole evening ; and that an elderly unknown person of soiled appear- ance, who had snugly ensconced himself into a corner, was so tight so tightly wedged, I mean that he could not move on, although repeatedly requested to do so. Exceedingly unceremonious is your East-ender when you get him pure and simple. Yet even he has his little prejudices. In the matter of dress he is conventional to the point of thraldom. A girl, for instance, who should attempt to take her hair out of curling-pins until the afternoon would lay herself open to the suspicion of affectation. Also, in spite of the popular impression to the contrary, she will never, or hardly ever, adorn herself with feathers and flowers. Her hat, when she wears one, is neatness itself. Her skirt may be of scarlet and her bodice of blue ; she may slip in a green scarf here, for the sake of effect, and a yellow sash there, for mere brilliance ; but she is a perfect prude in the matter of hats. There is a Diana- like chasteness about her headgear which removes it VIRTUES 103 altogether from the sphere of criticism. Again, in direct contradiction to general belief, corduroys would be con- sidered very bad form in the gilded youth of the East End, if the gilded youth of the East End at all affected them, which they don't. Should a young man attempt to wear corduroys he would lose caste. The young man in whom the wearing of corduroys had become a confirmed habit would be socially done for ; he would never be able to hold up his head again. Many people do not know these things, I used not to. But I had to learn them, whether I would or not. Let me tell my readers how. It was the morning of our annual excursion. The long line of brakes was on the move, and I was in the act of taking my place as per- sonal conductor, when a lad shouted out, " What about them corduroys and feathers, Mr. Free ? " I had no time to discuss the matter then ; but I gathered from the polite remarks that followed me as I drifted away in the wake of my Sunday School, that something disparaging to East-enders, of which I was supposed to be the author, had appeared in the morning paper. As soon as possible I secured a copy of the paper ; and there, sure enough, was the objectionable article feathers, corduroys, and all. And the impression was abroad that I had written it ! I spent the day in gloomy foreboding. " An enemy hath done this," I said. It was not difficult to fix the lie on its forger. It would probably have been quite as easy to bring it home ; but I knew human nature too well to suppose that I should succeed in turning the current of indignation by preferring a charge against another. My forebodings were not without reason. For months I endured a daily martyrdom. To be seen in public was the signal for a universal outburst of indig- io 4 SEVEN YEARS' HARD nation. It became almost impossible for me to walk down the West Ferry Road. The words " feathers " and " corduroys " hurtled through the air ; groans and hisses greeted me from groups at street corners ; indignant letters appeared in the local papers ; and, lastly, filling the cup of my bitterness to overflowing, came a question from my Bishop " People are writing to me about some article in a newspaper. What does it all mean ? " Your genuine East-ender is a stickler in the matter of dress. Dress excepted, however, he is the most unceremo- nious of human kind. Consequently, the snob cannot live in the East End. Now and again he tries to, but I have never known him to succeed. For a time neigh- bours may be tolerant, hoping for better things. But the inevitable is bound to come. The " gentleman," the " lady," the " doctor's widow," the " lord's grandnephew " the snob assumes a dozen titles suddenly disappears, generally in the middle of the night, followed by a united yell of execration from his numerous creditors. No ! The snob cannot thrive in the East End. For no true East-ender pretends to be what he is not, or claims any kind of distinction that he does not possess. Is it surprising that he is frankly contemptuous of the pomps and vanities of Church and State ? The Lord Mayor's Show does not rouse his enthusiasm ; nor a Royal procession. He is no more concerned with them than he is with a thanksgiving service at St. Paul's or a Church Congress. He reads sarcastic paragraphs about them in his Sunday newspaper, and he puts them all in his pipe, as it were, and smokes them. The great ones of earth are to him so many marionettes, who go through a series of clever, but stilted and unlifelike VIRTUES 105 performances, and succeed in making sensible folk laugh immoderately. I have had to teach East End boys and girls " God save the Queen " with the same painstaking care that I have taught them " Praise God from whom all bless- ings flow." Even when learnt, neither the National Anthem nor the grand old Doxology has inspired them with any sense of reward for their trouble. My club lads used resolutely to refuse to take off their hats during the singing of the National Anthem ; and the crowded audiences invariably attracted by our .entertainments would clear off as fast as their legs could carry them, the moment the announcement was made that we would close the proceedings in patriotic fashion. But the war changed all that. One evening, about a month after fighting began in South Africa, I was amazed to hear the " big drum " of our lads' brigade insisting that the whole company should doff their caps on his striking three thumping beats as a signal for " God save the Queen." " Hats off, please ! " cried the " big drum " ; and in a moment every head was bared, and a score of lusty young voices took up the familiar strain. Nowhere does the admirable independence of the East-ender's character show to greater advantage than in his superiority to physical pain. Sylvia cut her finger one day. It bled profusely. " How did you stop the bleeding ? " I asked, glancing compassionately at the wounded member. " Oh, dad soon settled that by clapping a teaspoonful of salt on it." II It hurt, eh?" The child paused. "Well," she said, with a little ripple of laughter, " it did make me 'op a bit." 106 SEVEN YEARS' HARD Who ever heard of a factory girl acknowledging her- self to be ill ? She may be actually dying on her feet ; the pressure of her daily toil may have so told upon her as to have utterly undermined her health ; as the result of incessant labour under harmful conditions, her whole frame may be honeycombed with disease ; but you won't catch her complaining. Not she ! There's a many a great deal worse orf than wot she is that's straight ! You meet a boy in the street with his eye bunged up by a mosquito bite. " Hullo, sonny ! Been in the wars ? " "Thet ain't nuffink ! You oughter to see Billy's mouf." " What ! " you say to a woman ; " got your fingers cut off in the machinery ? Poor, poor thing ! " " Lord ! " is the laughing reply, " wot's it matter ? It'll be all the same in a 'underd years." It smacks of fatalism, somewhat ; but, after all, that is the kind of stuff which, in the past, has made England what she is ; and that is the kind of heroism of which any country might well be proud. Nellie Winder got asbestos in her eyes ; her suffer- ings were terrible. She went up to one of the great London hospitals, and was kept in a draughty hall from half-past eleven to half-past six. There was a crowd of people waiting, for the most part old men, women, and little children ; and although it was in the depth of winter, and a bitter north-easter was blowing, not one of the officials who bustled to and fro all day long had the common-sense or common chanty to close the windows. But Nellie did not complain. All she said, when narrat- ing the circumstance, was, " Good job I 'adn't to go * in ' ! " Young Mathers contracted small-pox. When he was VIRTUES 107 convalescent, I tried to get him to a home. To my astonishment, nobody would have him. All charitable avenues were rigidly closed against him. That was unfair ; it was even indecent. When all has been said that can be said about the need for the most scrupulous care, the fact remains that the small-pox convalescent is as dangerous as every other convalescent, no more and no less. It is unworthy of our common brotherhood that a peculiar stigma should attach to him. To debar him from the help of the benevolent, simply because his sickness has been of a particularly trying kind, is as illogical as it is inhuman. Mathers was obliged to return to his work without a holiday, with the result that it was many months before he recovered his strength. Yet he made no fuss. His only comment was, " I guess they're afraid o' we East End chaps." And he was about right. The fear of the East End by those who know nothing of it would be ludicrous were it not so sad. As a matter of fact, the West Ferry Road or the Commercial Road is far safer than Regent Street or Oxford Street ; and as for women, they are so rarely molested, or even rudely spoken to, that when such a thing occurs it causes quite a sensation. The East End has a bad name ; and a place, like a dog, with a bad name is done for. " Can any good come out of Nazareth ? " But I have wandered from my point, which is that the East-ender is a hero of no mean type. He will uncom- plainingly endure ills that you and I would tragically call heaven and earth to witness. His whole life is so poor, so suffering, so limited, so grey, that one pain, one degradation, one misery, more or less, does not matter. " Well, I shall have to make the best of it," he says. 108 SEVEN YEARS' HARD And thereby hangs the story of his life from the cradle to the grave. He makes the best of it. His motto would seem to be, " Enjoy life if you can, and while you can ; and if you can't, don't make a fuss about it/' One winter evening I came across two lads sitting on a doorstep. The one was eating fried fish piping hot from the grill ; the other was smoking a cigarette. The cigarette- smoker was a very small boy ; and in the course of con- versation I ventured to suggest, humbly enough, I trust, that it might be well for him to wait a year or two before indulging in the habit. " Wot 'o ! " observed the elder boy, his mouth full. " 'E may be a dead 'un by that time. Smoke an' eat "- he crammed a huge lump of fish into his mouth " smoke an' eat while you can, I sez." CHAPTER V LIMITATIONS MUCH of this book will be unintelligible unless the peculiar limitations of the East-ender's existence are carefully borne in mind. Millwallers, as I have said, are quite isolated from the rest of London, but hardly more so than are other parts of the East End. Nor, although the East End is fringed along its whole length by the Thames, is this isolation modified to any per- ceptible degree by the coming and going of seafaring men. It is amazing that more sailors are not turned out of this water-intersected land. One would imagine that to the growing lad, whose brain is a-teem with romance, the masts that rise everywhere like a winter forest, the great ships cautiously stealing down the river, the dry docks where battered hulks are patched and painted into smart craft, the music of winch and crane, of bell and siren, would fill him with hungry longing for the freedom and joy of a sailor's life. Nothing of the kind. The old salts he knows, who on rare occasions, over pipe and glass, crack of their sea-roving days, are shattered hulks indeed. For them there is no dry dock where they can be furbished up to look like new. They are just a commonplace lot of no SEVEN YEARS' HARD toiling men, worried, and tired, and failing in health, with no prospect but the sick asylum and a pauper's grave, when the once brawny muscles fail for good and all. Is it any wonder that the lad stops his ears to the charmer, turns his back on the sea, and becomes odd boy in a neighbouring yard at eight shillings a week ? Sailors are the only men in the East End who travel, and for all the good it does them, apart from the getting of the daily bread, they might as well follow the example of the yard-boy. Ask one of them to relate his experiences, and you will learn how little education for the uneducated there is in travel. Has he been to China ? Yes but the Chinese is a rum lot. He knows India? A bit and the Indians is a rum lot. Has he ever gone as far as New Zealand ? You bet ! and the Maoris are a rum lot, if you like. East-enders are no travellers. Three months after Flossie Romer was married, her husband went to Canada, where he obtained an excellent situation. The days and weeks passed by, but Flossie made no effort to join him. I remonstrated, I urged, I almost threat- ened. All in vain. In the third year after the young man's departure, Flossie's mother assured me in a stage whisper that she very much feared that her daughter would never summon up courage to go ; for, she added, " Flossie is so frightened of the water that I can hardly get her to go to Gravesend ! " There are people in the East End who have not been five miles from London in their lives ; and the number of those, old and young alike, who have never seen London I mean, as represented in its great national monu- ments : Westminster, the British Museum, the National Gallery, the Temple, and so on is legion. LIMITATIONS 1 1 1 I once handed in a telegram at an East End office. " Hum ! the Temple ! " mused the telegraph girl. " That's in the country, isn't it ? " "Bless my heart! No," I replied; "it's in the very middle of London." " Lon don ? " drawled the girl. " Oh h ! Then I suppose the City Road will find it " ! I overheard a curious conversation one summer after- noon. Mrs. Beam was sitting on our drawing-room window-sill, a favourite resting-place for the weary, pouring into the sympathetic ears of a few bosom friends the appalling fact that she had to go, that very evening at seven, to meet her niece at Liverpool Street Station. How long it would take her to get there she really did not know ! She thought she'd just brush her hair, put on her bonnet, and start at once. At that moment my wife stepped into the street. "You'll have to wait for hours if you go now," she said. " It's only three o'clock. If you'll tell me where your daughter is coming from, and at what time she leaves, I'll ascertain exactly when she is due to arrive." Mrs. Beam was confounded, and all the other women sniffed, except one, who said incredulously, " Lor' now ! can you do all that ? " " Oh, yes. We have a time-table, you know." " You don't say so ! " said the incredulous woman. " And what might that be, now ? " " Obviously," said my wife, forgetting that to the East-ender nothing is necessarily obvious, " a book containing the times of trains, the times of the arrival and departure of every train in Great Britain." The incredulous woman screwed up her lips as if on ii2 SEVEN YEARS' HARD the point of whistling, but, abandoning the idea, simply said, " Ah ! " " I'll go and fetch it," said my wife. As she re-entered the house, she overheard one of the women exclaim " My Gawd ! How they do things, them people ! " By the very conditions of his life, the East-ender is denied the culture and discipline of travel ; and literature, that other great source of enlightenment, is a forbidden way to him because of his amazing lack of education and contentment therewith. Books stimulate thought, not emptiness. And the East-ender's mind is empty, not, indeed, because there is nothing to fill it, but because what there is cannot be got into it. Therefore bookshops, properly so-called, are almost unknown in the East End. Sir Walter Besant found in this part of the metropolis nothing but the Illustrated Police Budget. He was wrong, but not very far wrong. The Daily Mail is the only morning paper that has any sale to speak of; and the only evening paper that counts is the Evening News. Lloyds and Reynolds* form the staple Sabbath diet of the Millwall working-man, while a lighter kind of refreshment is provided by the London Comic, which is hawked about on Sunday afternoons by a fellow with the croak of a raven. Once, in the days of my hardihood, I asked at an East End newspaper shop for the Westminster Gazette. "The what?" politely inquired the old lady behind the counter. I repeated my request. " There's no sich paper," declared the old lady, with much assurance. " No such paper ! " I echoed, not without a touch of acerbity. " The Westminster Gazette has been in exist- LIMITATIONS 113 ence for years, and is one of the leading papers of the day." "Well, / never 'card of it," the old lady declared aggressively. " Why, where were you brought up ? " I said, with a feeble attempt at being funny. The old lady took the remark amiss. " 'Ere ! " she screamed, " 'Ere ! For thirty years I've lived 'ere, and it's the first time as / was ever asked for your West- minister Gazette" He does not hunger and thirst after knowledge, your East-ender. I used to be keen on getting him to read, supposing the thing could be done. So I bought a capital selection of books, and offered them at an absurdly low price, but I never succeeded in selling them. Travel and books are not popular in the East End. Were it possible to plump down at our very doors the finest library in the kingdom, it is doubtful if we should have either the energy or the ability to avail ourselves of the intellectual pabulum provided. Could free excur- sions on our behalf be organised to the four quarters of the globe, it is as certain as can be that the scheme would fail for lack of applicants. Let the reader try to imagine the condition of a people who neither read nor travel ; who know no- thing of the great tide of culture running at their very feet ; who are unaware of those heirlooms of theirs, the thoughts of their noblest fellow-countrymen ; who are oblivious of the very existence of the men of renown of other nationalities who, with their peers everywhere, are building up, stone by stone, the fabric of society ; and he will realise why these people are what they are. I 1 1 4 SEVEN YEARS' HARD Who shall venture, in the face of such limitations, to be astonished at anything they may do or say ? And they do and say some very extraordinary things, of which I will give a few examples. It was Witson who, coming across a History of Hol- land, begged to be told in what language it was written. " German," said my wife. " No ! " objected Witson, pointing to the title. " That ain't German ; that's 'Olland." Which is a fair sample of the cocksureness of the average East End lad. Old Pete, after incredible pressure, went to the sick asylum. He was back in a month. " They discharged you ? " I asked, in surprise. " I discharged myself," said Old Pete. " There was a man nex' bed to me wot they killed orf." "Killed off? " " Yes. That's wot they do there. Everybody knows that. Drugs ! I know. Not me ! " He turned to his wife. "If you want to 'urry me up, send me to the infirm'ry, mate ; if you want me to live, keep me at 'ome." It is no exaggeration to say that hundreds of East- enders die in utter wretchedness every year rather than go to the sick asylum. The prejudice is of many years' standing, and may be traced back, perhaps, to the barbarous days of the early part of the nineteenth century. I once preached on the subject of " Boy- Atheists." A day or two afterwards, one of my visitors was calling on Mrs. Grimes, in order to ascertain why her little girl had been absent from Sunday School on the previous Sunday. " Well, it's like this, miss," Mrs. Grimes explained ; LIMITATIONS 115 " I 'appened to tell my 'usband what Mr. Free was a-doin' " " How do you mean what he was doing ? " " Why, that 'e 'ad been an' got a boy-atheist to preach in 'is church. My 'usban' says to me, 'e says, ' Take that child away from Free's, Sary Ann. D'ye 'ear ? Take 'er away ! No atheists for me ! ' 'E was that angry, miss, an' swore that dreadful, that " with a self- righteous sniff " I took her away at once." I verily believe that not one-half of the people of Millwall have ever quite realised that St. Cuthbert's is a Christian church, or that it is connected in any sort of way with the Church of England. They regard it in the light of a " show " which I am running for my own profit. " Free's " is the name it generally goes by, and sometimes by designations which are even less polite. " Goin' to get 'im christened to-day ? " I overheard Mrs. Gallivan asking a neighbour whose voice I failed to recognise. " No. Sunday week." " That's right. Be good for once in your life ! Where? Chapel?" " Lord, no ! Old Dick's." It was difficult to persuade the members of our Window Gardening Society that plants of unprepossess- ing appearance possessed any value. Mrs. Worcester threw her begonia bulbs on to the top of a cupboard, under the impression that they were onions ; and Mrs. Twobear was so disgusted with the grubby look of her geraniums, that she tossed them into the dustbin. Another practical member boiled her tulip bulbs for her husband's dinner ; while the mingled joy and astonish- ment of Mrs. Skimper are worth preserving. " I sowed I 2 n6 SEVEN YEARS' HARD them withered old things wot you sent me, and I'm blest if they didn't come up \ " All this, of course, is very excusable, when one reflects how few opportunities East-enders have of cultivating flowers ; but the lack of opportunity is sad to reflect upon. - I have already spoken of Cassandra. She was a fear- ful lump of a girl, very hoarse, exceedingly prone to religion and novelettes, and amorous to the bursting point. Strange things she said and did during her short reign. The order of the household astonished her mightily. That one should knock before entering a room, sound a gong to announce a meal, show visitors into the drawing-room instead of leaving them on the doorstep these and a hundred other novelties rilled her with amazement. Also, she loved a discovery. She made one on the occasion of the first and almost only formal call we ever had from a neighbour. My wife and I were out at the time. On our return, Cassandra burst into the room in a state of unwonted excitement, wildly flourishing a couple of visiting cards. " Look 'ere ! " she cried. " A gentleman come, and a lady come with him, and they both left their tickets" A well-known public-house in the West Ferry Road is called the Lord Nelson^ and a life-size figure of the hero, ensconced in a niche like a mediaeval saint, bears witness to the interesting fact. One March, this public- house was undergoing a spring-cleaning, and about the same time I was arranging with the venerable Earl Nelson to come and talk to my workers. " Ah !" observed Mrs. Standby, when she heard of the nobleman's visit, " that's very interestin'. It '11 be so gratifyin' for 'im to see his pub. nice and clean." LIMITATIONS 117 In what manner could the East-ender's limitations be better exhibited than in his treatment of a stranger ? I have already narrated my own experience, how the factory-girls would stand and yell at me. That, of itself, of course, is no proof of narrowness ; for we all know that to bait the parson whenever possible is quite the correct thing. But I have often been sadly divided between the longing to laugh and the obligation to weep at the badgering the well-dressed stranger would receive at the hands of his fellow-countrymen of the East End. Men and women alike would cheerfully criticise him, passing candid remarks on his personal appearance his gait, dress, features, and then would fall into convulsions of merriment at their own wit. I have given the matter my careful consideration, and have come to the con- clusion that the well-dressed stranger acts upon the mind like a tonic. Work is not inspiriting in the East End ; frequently it is depressing. Under its influence one is apt to get down-hearted ; life seems colourless and empty ; when, lo, the well-dressed stranger, and joy unspeakable ! He is a denizen of another sphere. He brings with him some of the romance and mystery of the penny novelette and the feuilleton of the halfpenny newspaper ; and because the East-ender does not understand him, he laughs at him. What more natural ? The peculiarity, when one thinks of it, is not confined to the East End. Sometimes, when the East-ender has had his laugh out, he begins to exhibit mild curiosity. " But what have you come here for?" I used to be frequently asked, at one time. And an assurance that I had come to try to be helpful met with polite but decided sceptic- ism. Slingsby, who was a server, asked me, " And what n8 SEVEN YEARS' HARD was you afore you come 'ere? A plumber?" And Gravestone marvelled that I did not look out for " a better job." Miss Birtem, a lady worker, possessed a portable harmonium, with which she used to delight the factory- girls during their dinner hour. After examining the instrument, one of the most serious of her hearers asked her, " Now, what else do you do with it ? Do you play it round the pubs, of a hevening ? " As I have said, the East-ender is suspicious of the stranger. He is as certain as he can be that, in some mysterious way, unknown and unknowable, we are all making a good thing out of him. A lady gave me a guinea for my Boys' Club, and most unfortunately mentioned the fact to some of the lads. For weeks afterwards I could not step out of doors without being greeted with cries of " Wot about that sovereign wot Mrs. Green away give you ? Come on ! 'And it over ! " And it was not until Hal Cobbold had waited on me, and had received my personal explanation with many grunts of dissatisfaction and grins of doubt, that the matter was allowed to die a natural death. Nowhere are the limitations of the East-ender more aggressively obvious than in his language. By "lan- guage " I do not mean bad language. The East-ender can claim no monopoly of that ; although, to be quite fair, were a prize for bad language offered for competition, in all probability he would win it easily. In parentheses I should like to say that the man who habitually uses what we call bad language does not mean very much by it. There is, of course, the danger of minimising its significance. A friend once suggested to me that con- tinued contact with vile talk in the long run will blunt LIMITATIONS 119 the finest sensibilities. It may be so. I will admit that language which shocked me when I came to the East End ceased to do so after the first year or so. Nevertheless, I am certain that the swearer or blasphemer, or even the person who delights in mere foulness of expression, means much less by it than we are apt to imagine. Besides which, the language of the East End, although bad, is, if one may trust Shakespeare, an improvement on that of the time of Elizabeth. Let the reader, whose over-sensi- tive ears are disturbed by expressions which fall all too easily from the lips of the East End working-man, read the common talk of Falstaff and his friends, from Prince to potboy. In comparison the working-man will seem a purist. Properly understood, the use of bad language is due to a desire to be forcible. To the East End enthusiast, the ordinary vehicles of thought become insufficient ; so he presses into service lurid, profane, even filthy words. In a similar quandary the West-ender refers to a nuisance, a shipwreck, or a bonnet as " awful " ; the East-ender speaks of a " bloody " nuisance, shipwreck, bonnet, and so on : yet the East-ender means no more than the West-ender. A Mayfair mother tells her child that if he doesn't stop crying she will whip him ; an East End mother warns her child that if he doesn't stop crying she will pulverise him, perform certain surgical operations upon him, and do such and such other things to him as may not be referred to even in the most round- about fashion. But the wife of the gentleman and the wife of the labourer mean the same thing, namely, an old-fashioned remedy for naughtiness whose efficacy will last while the world does, " God strike me blind ! " sang an entrancing little maiden of five whom I chanced upon, 120 SEVEN YEARS' HARD in the West Ferry Road, gleefully dancing to the lilt of an impromptu melody. The child meant nothing by it. The phrase sounded musically to her. Somehow or other it fitted her mood ; that was all. And I cannot help thinking that East End men and women " swear " pretty much in the same innocent way as that child did. But it is the East End vernacular that I wish now to consider. It is a language of its own, simple and vigor- ous. Drawn from innumerable sources, high and low, classical and unclassical, levying contribution on the college-hall and the drawing-room no less than on the yard and the workshop, it yet retains its own character, its own particular flavour. And to those who use it the polite babblings of " society " sound inconceivably ridi- culous and affected. Decima's mother, now and again, used to do a day's charing for us. On these occasions, as it afterwards transpired, she was wont to improve herself by commit- ting to memory such new words and phrases as she chanced to hear. One day, in a burst of confidence, Decima made an announcement. " Camilla " that was her sister " laughs fit to bust 'erself at mother after she's been workin' in this 'ouse. Mother, she outs with such new-fangled, furrin talk ; and Camilla says, ' Oh, I see you've been to the Frees' again.' " " Foreign talk ? " I repeated, thoroughly mystified. " You know," explained Decima. " Them crack-jaw words about a mile long, wot nobody knows the meanin' of." " Oh, I see," I said humbly, as the truth broke on me that our English was as foreign to them as theirs is to us. The East-ender's accent is not infrequently a source LIMITATIONS 121 of mirth to the superior reader of the comic journal. Could the superior reader see himself as the East-ender sees him, his mirth would come to an untimely end. Our lads used to be openly contemptuous of my style of speech. One of their number was the notorious Sammy. The first time I ventured to address this young gentleman by name, he turned on me with the rebuke " Sammy ! It's not Sammy ; its Seammy." Nina, as was to be expected, was keen on my educa- tion. She took me severely to task on one occasion for the manner in which I pronounced the word " Green- wich." In my blind way I had gone through life talk- ing of " Grinnidge." Nina informed me that this was wrong. " Oh, is it ? " I said, with my usual humility ; " how's that ? " " Well, it's quite simple," said]Nina ; " G, r, double-e, n spells green, don't it ? W, i, c, h spells wich, don't it ? Very well ! the whole word spells Green-wich, not Grinnidge. See ? " And Nina smiled her ultra-superior smile. There was no gainsaying it the smile, I mean. The East-ender suffers from complaints which nobody else ever heard of. Where among his fashionable patients would a West End physician find such diseases as, for instance, " chronitis," " acronitis," " instepsia," " purisy," " ammonia," " plumonia," " discussion of the brain," " typhite fever," " nervous ability," " con- fused shoulder," "wind that flies to the head," and " haricot veins " ? Incredible as it may seem, East- enders do suffer from these maladies they have told me so. A woman in great distress, whose sick husband I had been hastily summoned to see, met me on the 122 SEVEN YEARS' HARD doorstep with " Oh, he is bad, pore feller ! The doctor says he's got an enlarged progress in his inside." If there be, as there may be we won't deny the possibility some confusion somewhere, it is to be solely attributed to the malicious habit of words, which connote very different things, sounding alike. The mother of one of my boys was about to enter the estate of matrimony for the second time. " Yes, it's bin a bit lonely since Proggins died," she observed, reflectively ; " but things '11 be brighter now. It is so important to have a little symphony." " No ! I don't exactly object to the Psalms," Mrs. Pontiac has often declared to me ; " but I do love them Ancient and Moral Hymns." It was Seater, one of my first servers at the altar, who invariably referred to the purificator as the"puripitater," while his hopeless confusion between hassocks and cassocks was a terrible thing to hear. A born East-ender says " subsequently " for " conse- quently " ; he speaks of good things being " far and few between," of a person being " gifted " to drink ; of the Charity Ignatian Society, and of a " convalenty " home. Perhaps the reader may not be aware that a " fetchin* of beer" is a quantity such as one would ordinarily " fetch," namely, a pint or a quart ; that to drink it at a draught is to " mop it up " ; that ;^in order to pay for it, one must have at least a " doose " (twopence), possibly an " 'og " (a shilling), and sundry " fadges " (farthings) ; that rum is " Nelson's blood " ; that " gaffing " is gam- bling ; " lumping," pawning ; an " aiiter," a prize-fighter ; a " tiger," a flat-iron ; nor may it have occurred to him that the East End use of the adverb "being," for " seeing," is as old at least as Hooker. LIMITATIONS 123 Why is it, I wonder, that East End matrons and maidens imagine their signatures to be imperfect unless prefixed by " Mrs." or " Miss " ? Very rarely will a woman or girl sign her name without these " outward adornings." Forewarned is forearmed ; therefore, when I want a signature, I stipulate, " Simple Christian and surname, please." So with letters. More often than not, a confidential, not to say affectionate, epistle will conclude oh, so coldly ! with, " Yours truly, Mrs. Jones ! " Men rarely fall into the muddle ; but once in my experience an excited bridegroom distinguished himself thus. For an unfortunate moment my atten- tion was arrested ; and when I turned, there it was, sure enough, in the marriage register " Mr. Tom Smith." Talking of names, it is quite a common thing for dock-labourers to have several names. I was once neatly taken in by young Patty O'Gorman, whom I had refused to recommend for a much-desired job. Patty assumed one of his many aliases, obtained a recommen- dation of a most flattering kind from a man who, I fear, knew little or nothing of him, palmed himself off on me as Silas Quorl, and got the situation. I had no redress, because he insisted that Silas Quorl was his real name. In this connection, a curious custom obtains among East-enders, namely, that of discarding one's own name and taking on that of one's mother by a second marriage. A young fellow came to me about a situation. " Your name ? " I asked. " Charles Brown," he answered promptly. I wrote it down. " Address ? Age ? " I was continuing, when he inter- rupted i2 4 SEVEN YEARS' HARD " Of course, Charles Brown ain't my real name." " Oh ! " I exclaimed, pen poised in air. " But it's your real name I want, my lad." " My real name is Robinson." " Why did you say Brown ? " I asked, writing Robinson over the cancelled word. " Of course," he replied, with an indulgent grin at my infirmity of intellect, " my real name is Robinson ; but my right and proper name is Brown." I put down my pen in dismay ; and it was only after ten minutes' diligent sifting that I discovered that his mother had married twice, the name of her first husband being Brown, and that of her second Robinson. For a woman to retain the name of her first husband during the whole of her married life with a second is so common a circumstance as to excite no remark ; and if one is ever so indiscreet as to express surprise at such a thing, one is invariably met with some such explanation as this : " Oh, well ! people don't know me by my new name it's strange to 'em, you see ; so I keeps to the old one as being more convenient." And here I am reminded that nowhere are the East- ender's limitations more pronounced than in the rela- tions of the sexes. The opportunities children have of striking up an acquaintance are unlimited. There are no preliminaries to be arranged, no conventions to be observed. Before they are out of their 'teens, a boy or girl may have had a dozen such flirtations. " I'll be at the fire-station to night at eight. Come ? " says the boy, not without shyness. " You ain't got a cheek, you ain't ! Anythink else in a small way ? " answers the girl, with a gasp and a giggle. But she goes all the same. It may be the first bit of LIMITATIONS 125 sweethearting she has ever engaged in ; it will certainly not be the last. The probability is that the two will get tired of one another in a month, in which case fresh alliances will be entered into on both sides with bewilder- ing rapidity. You smile approval on what looks like a promising match. " A likely couple," you say to yourself, as you see them walking down the road six feet apart. " Where's Alfred ? " you ask, a week later, on meeting the girl. " Oh ! Alf's orf. It's Jim Johnson now," she answers with undisguised satisfaction. These things arrange and rearrange themselves very early in the East-ender's life ; for, among the workers there is a premature development of both sexes unknown to the upper and middle classes. One's thoughts involuntarily turn to the south, where girls are women and boys are men at thirteen. Tillie B.'s lovers we always call her Tillie B. ; I don't quite know why were many and varied. She rarely kept one on for longer than a fortnight. It has been my privilege to secure the following letter, which I dutifully pass on to the reader : Miss BAGIN, I have become friends again with an old sweetheart I used to go with, and I am going with her again. So our friendship must cease. I am, Yours faithfully, ROBERT STOKER. 126 SEVEN YEARS' HARD The answer to this formal epistle was extremely characteristic : DEAR BOB, Cheer up ! You'll soon be dead. Yours ever, TILLIE. One day I came suddenly upon Tillie and young Beetroot standing in somewhat close proximity in the entrance passage of our house. Something in their looks gave me pause. " Why, what ? " I began, turning from one to the other. Beetroot hung . his head sheepishly, but Tillie recovered herself in a moment. "You see," she explained, with her demurest smile, " George and me is ingaged." Within three weeks Tillie had taken to herself another sweetheart, to wit, Bertie Drayman, a boy who might have posed for Alphonse Daudet's Petit Chose. I remonstrated with Tillie on her inconstancy. As usual, she was equal to the occasion. " We got tired of one another, George and me," she said, with a reminiscent sigh, " and we both thought a change advisable. Then Bertie come along, and wanted me to keep company with him." " Keep company ? " I echoed, aghast. " Walk out with him, you know," interpreted Tillie, misinterpreting my astonishment. " And what did you say ? " I inquired. " Said I'd ask father." " And father ? " " Well, father said he thought we was too young to keep company, so now we only see each other." LIMITATIONS 127 It is refreshing to find a touch of the celestial in a place so mundane as the East End. There many good folk neither marry nor are given in marriage, although, to be quite truthful, they are not on that account " as the angels." Marriage is too civilised for such persons. Being primitive, they adopt primitive methods. " So many as are coupled together otherwise than God's Word doth allow are not joined together by God, neither is their matrimony lawful," says the Prayer Book. But such people know nothing of the Prayer Book, and merely follow their natural instincts. Only those who live in the East End can form any conception of the preva- lence of such irregular unions. There is not of necessity an absence of order and decency in these relationships. Couples one has known and respected for years, men and women who have brought up large families in a manner that defies criticism, will be discovered, mostly by accident, to be lacking the legal bond. Sometimes there is a real impediment to lawful union ; more often there is none. The relationship has been drifted into, has been found mutually agreeable, and has become fixed by habit. Very rarely, at the eleventh hour, the man deserts the woman ; still more rarely, the woman the man. But, for the most part, where the union has survived the first outburst of animalism, the contract- ing parties remain as faithful to one another as those married by Church or State. For the most part, neither father nor mother is troubled by qualms of conscience. Whatever suffering arises from the irregular union is borne by the child. Never shall I forget young Penny's despair when he discovered that he was branded with shame which no effort of his could ever wipe out. The young man was stunned. He looked from one to the 128 SEVEN YEARS' HARD other in dumb amazement. Then his eyes fell upon the mother whom he had learned to love, and, turning away, he burst into tears. It would be wise, maybe, to stop here in the con- sideration of an unpleasant subject ; but the reader, I hope, will pardon me for citing two cases which are typical of very many in the East End. Martha, a delicate-looking girl, was once respectably married ; but that was not enough for her. She must needs leave her husband, and force herself on a previous lover. Her paramour treats her with the utmost brutality, frequently turning her into the street and compelling her to wander about the livelong night. He beats her unmercifully on the slightest pretext, and never allows her to forget what she is. Yet she clings to him, defends him from the sharp tongue-thrusts of neighbours, and goes on bearing him children, one and all of whom are tainted with the consumption from which she herself suffers. How long, one wonders, will a Christian State permit such degradation within its borders ? The second instance is that of Cora. By sixteen this girl had sunk to the lowest depth of infamy she was the mistress of her own father. Repeated efforts were made to save her. Many a walk and talk have I had with her. How I have pleaded with her ! She would kneel with me in prayer in my study. She would solemnly promise to lead a new life, and for a time would keep her oath, and stand firm and fast in the mad black rush of temptation. But the whirlpool always sucked her down again ; and now, in the midst of the riot of waters, she draws daily nearer to the end. One turns with relief to the normal married life of the LIMITATIONS 129 East-ender ; but even here there is no lack of the grue- some. Marriage brings to the East End girl a host of troubles. Her children are naturally her first thought. She will starve herself to get them food ; and so she is often compelled to take a turn at the factory, which exhausts her strength, and in the long run is detrimental to her children. Nor is it exclusively the wife of the sluggard or the drunkard who is obliged to go to work. At times the steadiest and most industrious men are unable to keep things going without the assistance of the " missus." What with high rents, large families, and the price of food, there is nothing but starvation for many an East End working-man's family if his own wages are solely relied upon. The few extra shillings brought in by the wife make all the difference. Then the married woman in the East End is a slave to her husband as long as he lives. Should he un- happily, or happily, die, she transfers her vassalage to her eldest son. The boy may be but eighteen, sixteen, fourteen ; but, insolent and selfish beyond belief, he will not even stop short of turning his mother out of doors. I have known a lad actually order his widowed mother to bed ; and she would meekly obey, in order to escape his violence. Yet it would not be correct to say that the East End woman's married life is particularly unhappy. On the whole, one is inclined to think that it is as happy as that of her sister in the West. It must not be forgotten, of course, that the East End is a century behind the times. Nowhere else would a woman esteem herself happily married if her husband was in the habit of blacking her eyes or breaking her nose ; yet such trifling incidents in nowise seriously interfere with the matrimonial bliss of K 130 SEVEN YEARS' HARD East End women. Indeed, wife-beating is such a recog- nised institution, that a husband would lose caste should he so far forget his marital privileges as to be a total abstainer in this respect. "Wot's up, Bella?" solicitously inquired a young woman, in my hearing, of a friend whose appearance indicated that she had been in the wars. " Oh, nothink ! On'y my mate chastised me last night ; so I've got to go about with a couple o' coloured eyes." " Does your father ever wallop you ? " Lizzie Hagger- ston was asked by a small girl friend. " Not 'arf ! I might as well be his wife ! " was Lizzie's answer. East End lads have been known to " chastise " their girls before marriage. Sometimes, however, the mare is the better horse, in which case I am uncertain whether the condition of the " henpecked " husband is not more pitiable than that of the "chastised" wife. " Why has Mrs. Templar taken to drink ? " I once inquired of that lady's friend. " Well, she's got a lot to put up with ; and when I tell you as 'ow 'er 'usband openly defies 'er, you'll under- stand." Flappery, whose devotion to his tippling wife I have already described, had a wretched time of it. He was one of the henpecked ones. His wife's moral weakness made her incredibly selfish. She would eat and drink her fill in his presence, without permitting him a bite or a sup of the good things she had reserved for herself. Now and again he would meekly try to filch a slice of meat to match his bread ; but if she caught him at it, LIMITATIONS 131 woe betide him ! Nevertheless the poor wretch was only too happy to lick the hand that tortured him ; and when his wife was struck down with a loathsome disease, his love for her was very wonderful, passing the love of women. But the long years of silent suffering had broken his heart ; and it was a pitiful wreck of a man that I induced, after much trouble, to leave his dying wife, and enter the cab which was to convey him to the lunatic asylum. The death of young Cartwright, recorded elsewhere, was the occasion of a curious revelation concerning matters matrimonial. Old Mrs. Crusty was only five years younger than her husband, but from the airs she gave herself she might have been fifty. " Tiresome old man ! " she would say, " I can't be bothered with him. 'E's so much older than me." "You shouldn't talk like that," Miss Grales would remonstrate. " Remember that you married him of your own free will." " I wouldn't if I'd knowed all. Why, I never dreamt as 'e would last so long." Now, when Mrs. Crusty heard of Cartwright's death she began to lament with exceeding bitterness. " Pore feller ! Taken in the flower of his young age, as you may say. An' to think o' mine ! Eighty next birthday, an' as well an' 'earty as many a kid ain't. Look at 'im ! 'E's spared ; while while ^" But Mrs. Crusty 's emotion choked further utterance. K 2 CHAPTER VI RECREATIONS FUNERALS and fights are the chief recreations of the East-ender. The news of a funeral flies like the wind. Crowds surge to the chief points of vantage ; necks are craned and cracked with eagerness ; the most strident voices are hushed to melodramatic whispers. Appears the solemn cortege^ very orthodox, very black, very ex- pensive, and very foolish. The deceased most likely was a man of humble position a dock-labourer, a fac- tory-hand or what not. No matter ! He must have the finest funeral that money can buy. Wasn't his life insured ? During his last illness I attended young Shippenoy, providing him with invalid dainties because his parents could not afford them. The poor boy lingered for several weeks, and at last died. I shall never forget the funeral of that sixteen-year-old lad. Four black coaches crammed with black mourners, each armed with a crisp, new, black-bordered handkerchief; eight black horses with sweeping black tails, accompanied by attendants in shiny black broadcloth ; a magnificent black hearse, bearing, amid many flowers, the coffin ; most impressive of all, four gentlemen, very solemn, very black indeed, RECREATIONS 133 who rode grandly behind each of the four black coaches ! Next day came a note from the lad's mother, begging a ticket for " a bit of coal, or even a little grocery," as " there was nothing whatever in the house." Very im- pressive indeed ! Funerals are a terrible tax on the poor. Yet if one ventures to remonstrate ever so mildly, one is told that " It's little enough we can do for 'em, pore things ; and if we can't show respect for the dead and gone by spend- in' a bit o' money on 'em, well, it's precious hard lines, that's all ! " It was Hayston who took his wife an ex- pensive journey into the country, because, had he buried her at the East London Cemetery, there would have been a balance on her life insurance ; and she was going to have every farthing of it, she was, if he knew what was what ! Something of fine feeling is in this, but more of the blind worship of fashion. There is not a mother's son of them all who is not keenly alive to the fact that, were he to adopt a style of obsequies suit- able to his position, he would be looked down upon by every right-hearted and wrong-headed neighbour. The conventionality of the East-ender in the matter of funerals is paralysing. Even babies, whose lives, un- happily, are held all too cheaply, must go to their long home with infinite pomp and circumstance. " I thought as you'd like to see 'er," said Mrs. Field, as she drew down the white cloth and uncovered the shrunken little face of her last-born. I did not speak for a long time. Speech seems so use- less in the presence of death. But at last I murmured words of comfort : God was good ; He knew best ; we must resign ourselves. The woman broke in rudely 134 SEVEN YEARS' HARD on my commonplaces. " It ain't so much the loss of 'er ; it's the cawst of 'er berrial," she said, irritably. That was a terrible admission, when you think of it. Put in plain English, it meant that the mother thought more of making a show of her dead child than a joy of her living one. East End funerals are good for the undertaker, bad for everybody else. For his own ends the undertaker fosters the love of grandeur, going to the length of publicly parading his black cavalcade in order to excite the jaded appetites of bereaved ones. " Wot a lovely sight ! And only ten pounds ! " But the loss to the poor, both material and moral, is quite incalculable. Money thus squandered could be used to so much better advantage ; and competition of the kind engen- ders vulgarity, pride, deceit, and deep irreverence. At bottom of it all, of course, lies the half-terrified curiosity about death I had almost said the morbid love of it. Nor do I think I should be far wrong if I allowed myself the expression. For morbid the East- ender's view of death undoubtedly is. " Come and see 'Liza in her cawfin ! " was the challenge passed from mouth to mouth by the little girls who had been 'Liza's playmates. And I find that to go and see 'Liza, or Tommy, or Mrs. Smith, or Mrs. Jones, in his or her " cawfin " is one of the keenest joys of old and young. You call on a neighbour to express your sympathy with the widow and the fatherless ; and, no matter what the deceased died of, you are sure to be greeted with " You'd like to see him, wouldn't you ? He looks bew- tiful." Death was the subject of the very first conversation I had with Tiny. At that time she was tiny indeed, and very torn and tattered at that. Her hair was always in RECREATIONS 135 wild disorder ; her stockings never, by any chance, covered her legs. The efforts she used to make to induce those stockings of hers to keep up for ten con- secutive seconds were beyond all praise, even as they were beyond all belief. She would tie them with odd bits of string anyone would lend her ; she would lunge at them as she ran, first one, then the other ; she would hold them up with both hands, and at such times her whirling progress through space was a sight for gods and men. But they always came slithering down again ; and after the twentieth attempt to fix them, she would abandon the things in despair, and go about naked and unashamed. On the day in question, Tiny came racing after me in her usual fashion ; and I knew by her breathless efforts to get alongside that she bore important news. In one hand she clutched a great hunk of bread and jam, which she nibbled at as she ran ; with the other she grabbed at her stockings. With a final spurt she was at my side. " Lit' girl there ! " she gasped, half-choked with jam and breathlessness, as she pointed down one of our riverside streets. I walked on. " Sich a nice little girl," pursued Tiny, recovering her breath, swallowing the remainder of the bread and jam, and just saving her right-leg stocking. But I was deep in meditation, wondering, as a matter of fact, what I should do about Cora, whose shameful life I have referred to in the last chapter ; and, although Tiny's little jammy fist was now in mine, my thoughts were far away. " Sich a nice little girl," repeated the child, not without reproach. I said I was so glad she was nice ; and off went my 136 SEVEN YEARS* HARD thoughts again after the wandering sheep. Presently I felt a tug at my coat. " Well ? " I looked down at the child, and discovered to my surprise that her eyes were filled with awe and wonder. " I seed her. She was wite wite as a ghost," said she in a stage -whisper. By this time I had reached the house where Cora lived. I knocked and was admitted. Just as I was closing the door behind me, I felt an obstruction, and, looking down, discovered Tiny's foot. " Hitter Fee ! " she whispered. "Well, what is it?" I asked, with growing impatience. " Sich a nice little girl," observed Tiny, going through a sort of dumb show, and letting the refractory stockings slide right down into her loosely-laced boots. " Boo- tiful nice little girl ! " " Yes, my dear, so you told me," said I, endeavouring to close the door, and again finding the obstructing foot. " Now, look here ! " I was really getting angry. " Mitter Fee ! " "Well, well! what is it?" " Nice little girl &?0-tiful nice." Tiny fitted the fingers of one hand on to those of the other, slowly parted them, gradually extended the space between them to her two arms' length, and said, with a shivering motion of her whole body that was intensely dramatic " Oh, she is stretched out so long. Dead /" This interest of Tiny's in death is typical of the attitude of all East-enders. Death appeals to them in a way perfectly incomprehensible to other people. The fascina- tion of it is, as I said, morbid ; it is also infectious* When Cappercorn, the Victoria Park preacher, met his death in a railway accident, a certain section of RECREATIONS 137 the population went crazy. People who had never in their lives spoken to the good man made his funeral an occasion of bacchanalian revelry. On the return from the cemetery, a woman and a child were killed and several persons were injured, Mrs. Grand attempted to poison herself, and Nancy tried to jump into the dock with her baby in her arms. So morbid is the love of death, that occasionally one finds the East-ender anticipating it in the most extra- ordinary fashion. One Sunday morning, Little Billee, as I used to call him, arrived in the choir-vestry magni- ficently attired in black black boots, black trousers, black waistcoat, black jacket, black tie, black hat. "Hullo! here's a swell!" I exclaimed, irreverently. Then, suddenly impressed by Little Billee's funereal appearance, I added, " I hope you're not in mourning for anyone." The boy hung his head. " Not yet" he murmured. I was so dumbfounded that I could ask no more questions then ; but I ascertained the facts from a sister on the following day. " Well," she explained, " it's like this : as the doctors give mother up, and Billy's been wanting a new suit for a long time, father thought as 'ow it would save money like if see ? " I did see, bade the girl a hurried adieu, and tumbled into the fresh air. Did the reader ever hear of a clergyman paying a formal visit to a corpse ? I have done that. Two days after the incident just related, I was hastily summoned by Little Billee's sister to " see mother." I hurried to the house, expecting to find the poor woman in articulo mortis. " How is she ? " I inquired, as well as want of breath would permit. 138 SEVEN YEARS* HARD " Gone ! " answered the daughter, shaking her head. " Dead ! " interpreted the husband and Little Billee together. " Poor thing ! " I exclaimed. " So she has passed away since you came for me ? " " Oh, no ! Not at all ! " was the answer. " She was dead then, but we thought as how you'd like to see her all the same." There must have been something weird about this family; for it was Little Billee who begged off from choir-practice " to go and see grandmother." " Is your grandmother ill ? " I inquired, solicitously. " She's dead," said Little Billee. Perhaps enough has been said to convince the most sceptical reader that I am in no way using the language of hyperbole in saying that funerals are one of the chief recreations of the East-ender. He revels no other word is adequate he simply revels in death. And second only to his love of death is his love of fight- ing. Fighting of a kind is bred in his bone and marrow. In my early days in the East End, it was not unusual for a free fight to take place in the midst of the solemnities of Sunday School ; and I have a vivid recollection of two young ragamuffins rolling over and over in what appeared to be a life-and-death struggle on the very steps of the altar. If the child does not grow up to be a fighter, the fault certainly does not lie with the parents. It is no uncommon thing for a boy to be beaten because he has not the pluck to retaliate. I have often heard a mother say to her little son, whom a schoolfellow had thumped all too vigorously : " You 'it 'im back, d' you 'ear ? or I'll tell your father of you, my boy ! " or, "If you don't give him one in the jaw, I'll pay you now then ! " RECREATIONS 139 East End children are taught to be fighters, but fighters of a kind. One suffocating day in midsummer, two little girls were carrying on a confidential conversa- tion just below my study window. " We give your Johnny a good 'idin' when he come out o' school this mornin', we did," observed the first little girl. " Garn ! " objected the second ; then, with contempt born of conviction, " you couldn't'' " Yes, we could ; and we did, too." " Not you ! " retorted the second little girl, with a brave show of assurance ; then, her curiosity over- mastering her, " Well, 'ow did you, then ? " " We chucked bricks at 'im," said the first little girl, triumphantly. The fighting instinct is strong in the East-ender ; the sporting instinct, weak. He " chucks bricks." Cruelty to animals was very common when I first came to the East End. The appearance of a dog would be the signal for a volley of hard words and harder stones. Many a terrified cat could be seen in those days madly careering down the street with a tin can tied to its tail. Com- plaints used to reach me of ducks and hens done to death in cold blood. Despite the fact that every male East-ender is a footballer born, the average man or boy, in a hand-to-hand conflict off the field, has no idea of confining his attention to that part of his adversary above the belt. I mean that while he adores horseplay, he does not bother about fairplay. Several instances of this moral perversity occur to me. It was the night of our return from one of our Sunday School excursions. The long line of brakes had just drawn up ; the cornets were still blaring " For Auld Lang Syne " ; the fireworks were hissing and 1 40 SEVEN YEARS' HARD spitting ; and the street was ablaze with crimson and green. As I was shaking hands with this one and that, I felt a gentle tap on my shoulder. Wheeling round, I found myself face to face with a number of young fellows, whom I at once perceived to be on mischief bent. One gets used to surprises in the East End ; and so, with a smile, I began chatting to them in an ordinary manner, and, after a few minutes' conversation, bade them good-night. I was turning away when there came another tap on my shoulder. I looked round, quietly remonstrated, and walked on. Tip-tap, tip-tap, came sundry little strokes in rapid succession. I had had a fatiguing day ; I was dead-beat ; and I suddenly lost my temper. Swinging up my right arm and whirling on my heel, I struck out at chance, and narrowly missed a lanky lad with a pasty face. " Was it you ? " I cried, in considerable wrath. " Not me. I never touched you," answered the pasty- faced one. "You, then?" I said, turning to a red-haired fellow of twenty-five or so. " Never lifted a finger," he assured me. My temper got the better of me. " Then who was it? If the coward who struck me behind my back will have the manliness to do the same to my face, I shall have the greatest pleasure in life in knocking him down ! " Not a fellow stirred, but a queer look crept from one to another. "And the Lord said unto Moses " chuckled a voice in the crowd. Another example of what I mean. One afternoon I fell in with a couple of men fighting in a by-street. One warrior was all but dead-drunk ; the other was as sober as I was myself. As I came up, the drunken man RECREATIONS 141 swayed under the onset of his opponent, and crashed to the pavement. He was bleeding and bruised ; he was dazed with drink and the shock of the fall. But half- a-dozen men ran in, set him on his feet, clapped him on the back, and urged him to go at it again. Cowed as he was, he would not show the white feather. With an oath he swayed forward to the unequal contest. I thought it time to interfere. " You're not fit to fight. Come away ! Wait until you are sober," I said. " What the hell is it to do with you ? " objected one of the crowd. " You mind your own business." " It isn't sport, friends," I said, " and you know it. You've no right to pit a poor drunken chap like that against a man who hasn't got a drop of drink in him. . . . You go home, my boy, and sleep it off." The backer of the sober man, who was himself more than half-seas over, came up and began to argue. I placed my hand on his shoulder and said, " I'm sober ; you're not. Would you call it sport if I treated you like this ? " With a smart shove I sent him flying, but caught him before he had time to measure his length. The argument seemed to convince him. This lack of courage takes some curious forms. For instance, when an East-ender wishes to avenge himself for an injury, he does so indirectly. If you are so unhappy as to offend him, he immediately proceeds to talk at you through the medium of an accommodating neighbour ; or he ensconces himself in the midst of his pals and freely expresses his opinion of you ; or he lies low indoors and shouts rude remarks at you as you pass by. The obvious advantage of this method is that everybody is at once acquainted with the matter in dispute, and is prepared to deliver judgment upon it. 1 42 SEVEN YEARS' HARD Similarly, lads have no notion of preferring their requests in a direct manner. Say they want you to start a football club. Do they ask you to ? Not a bit of it ! The first intimation you receive that something is amiss is their particularly riotous behaviour. If you are new to the work, you commit the indiscretion of turning out the ringleaders and making lifelong enemies ; but if you know the East End lad, you meditate : " Now, I wonder what they want ? " You guess to yourself ; and when you have satisfied yourself that you have guessed aright, you say in your most ingenuous manner : " Ah, by-the-way, I think it would be a capital idea to start a football team this winter. What do you say ? " A fight between women will draw even a larger crowd than one between men ; for it is a far more savage business. Nails are used instead of fists ; hysterical shrieks are uttered in place of modified and rather dignified grunts. There is less force about it, but more cunning ; less bruising, but more blood. I have seen a woman score another's face from brow to chin with her ten fingers ; and I have seen another tear handfuls of hair from her opponent's head. To add to the horror of a fight between women, the language is superlative. But perhaps the worst kind of fight is between a man and a woman. That is so shameful, so unnatural, so ferociously cruel, that it beggars description. Never- theless, such a fight is best left alone. Benevolent interference merely aggravates matters. The woman invariably sides with the man, even though he has been using her shockingly, and pours her vials of wrath upon the head of her would-be defender. A typical instance occurs to me. About two o'clock, one Sunday morning, that amiable RECREATIONS couple, Carmen and her husband, were engaged in a domestic difference just outside our house. The noise of it kept us all awake ; otherwise it was quite tolerable for half an hour or so. But when the man began banging the woman's head, and in the midst of her piercing shrieks we could hear, all too plainly, the thud, thud of her poor skull in contact with Mother Earth, my wife could contain herself no longer. Fling- ing up the window, she delivered herself unreservedly on the subject of the gentleman's ungentlemanly behaviour. The man paused in the operation of murdering his better-half, and stared stupidly in the direction of the terrible voice ; but the woman sprang to her feet and, coming close under the window, poured forth such a volley of abuse as I have rarely heard equalled. Working herself into a fury, she ventured to question our adherence to the sixth, seventh, eighth, and ninth commandments ; insisted on our blood relation- ship to cats, cows, swine, and other doubtful animals ; and concluded with the following unanswerable challenge : " Can't my 'usband do bloody well what he likes with his own ? " Calling on Mrs. Dackrush one day, I found her just returned from a holiday. " Been down to my old 'ome," she explained, smilingly. The freshness of the country seemed to cling to her ; she apparently had not had the courage to doff her smart Sunday attire. I had never seen Mrs. Dackrush look better than she did that after- noon. I felt quite proud of her as one of the earliest members of my Guild of Kindness. I thought to myself, " Now here's a nice little proof of my constant contention that these people accept their sordid lives only under the compulsion of grim necessity. The 144 SEVEN YEARS' HARD moment they free themselves from their environment, they become new creatures." The meditation was excusable ; for, indeed, Mrs. Dackrush did look " quite the lady," as a friendly neighbour put it. " I'm glad that you've been to your childhood's haunts," I said, grandiloquently. " And what did you do with yourself, now ? " "Well, I'll tell you," said Mrs. Dackrush, her face radiant. " The very fust thing as I does when I gets down to my old 'ome is to give that old sneak a good 'idin'." " What old sneak ? " I asked, aghast. " Haven't I never telled you about Mrs. Gammin? Her what sneaked about me when I was a little 'un, and got me a birchin' ? I sweared then that when I was growed up I'd be even with 'er. So every time I goes down to my old 'ome the fust thing I does is to go to 'er cottage and give her a jolly good 'idin'." It was a minute before I could get speech. " But she must be an old, old woman by now? " " That she is, as old as they make 'em ; but her age don't make no difference to me. She's got to have her 'idin' all the same, and she knows it." " And how old might she be ? " I asked, feeling that I was dreaming. " Seventy-six come Michaelmas. It's just thirty-five year since she played me that dirty trick ; but I ain't the one to forget a thing like that." " But," I began, still dazed and incredulous, " do I understand you to say ? " "You understand me to say, Mr. Free, that I gives Mrs. Gammin a thrashin' every time I goes to my old RECREATIONS 145 " But, my good woman, have you no pity ? " " Pity ? Not me ! Let them have pity wot can afford it. It ain't for the likes of me to indulge in no pity. She gets her 'idin' right enough every time I goes down to my old 'ome, and she expects it." And with that Mrs. Dackrush removed her best bonnet of demurest violet, glanced round the kitchen with a sigh of serenest satisfaction, and observed that there was nothing like a holiday to put a body in good spirits ! " Blessed are the merciful ; for they shall obtain mercy." One day, when Mrs. Sopster was " rather excited," as people say here, some one mentioned her ancient enemy, Mrs. Boggle. Mrs. Sopster waxed frantic. I urged patience and forgiveness. All in vain. Presently, as her eyes wandered round the room, they fell on a highly coloured picture of Christ on the cross. A great calm seemed suddenly to possess her. " It's quite right, wot you tell me about being for- givin'," she said, in a wonderfully subdued voice ; " it's only right and proper. Look at that ! " She pointed to the ugly little print. I looked obediently. Need- less to say, I was delighted at the change that had come over her. " Look at that ! " she repeated with energy, thrusting forth a forefinger. " Wot did He do ? " " You know," I answered, gravely. " Yes, I know ; / know. He forgave His enemies." I nodded. " He forgave His enemies," repeated Mrs. Sopster, but " she brought her clenched fist down on the table with a crash" I'm blowed if I do ! " Funerals and fights are the chief recreations of the East-ender. But he has other amusements less grue- L 146 SEVEN YEARS* HARD some and less gross than these ; and among them, (without counting fires and football), the serious drama, dancing, and singing take the highest place in popular favour. Football is not a recreation in the East End ; it is a religion. Its devotees are to be numbered by hundreds of thousands. Its worship is cultivated with a whole- hearted devotion which is as rare as it is astonishing. In days when zeal for the old faiths is growing cold, the apologist can point triumphantly to at least one cult which not only shows no sign of decadence, but which exhibits an exuberance of vitality unintelligible except on the supposition that it is indeed the power unto salvation for all future ages ! As to fires, so popular elsewhere, they are so common in the East End as to excite no special interest. It is such an ordinary experience for the engine to come tearing down the street, that one scarcely turns to see it. A huge fire blazed for hours within a few hundred yards of my house and the main road, but it caused no sensation whatever. A lady friend, who had had the temerity to make an afternoon call on us, was on her way back to the station when she encountered a great blaze in the West India Docks. So impressed was she by the awful grandeur of the spectacle, that she was strongly tempted to turn back and inform us of it. But, as she was pressed for time, she commissioned a girl well known to us to carry the news ; and the girl thought so little of the matter that she actually forgot all about it. But the serious drama, dancing, and singing are real, although minor modes, of recreation. The performances at the theatrte, sa he pictorial posters testify, are unique. RECREATIONS Here a convict is throttling an elderly gentleman in evening dress. There a juvenile gentleman, with a moustache impossible at his age, also in evening dress, is smashing plates over a friend's head, and all is blood and crockery. Elsewhere a lovely lady, very much in, or out of, evening dress, is stabbing her truly wedded husband in evening dress, while the youth who has caused all the trouble (he is in evening dress) is engaged in swallowing an enormous dose of prussic acid. Escaped convicts, ticket-of-leave men, murderers, highway robbers, and villains of every kind and degree bulk largely in these plays. The East-ender's drama is like his litera- ture lurid. The great art of dancing is wonderfully represented in the East End. As everybody knows, and nobody can explain, children and young people revel in the exercise, disporting themselves with a grace and abandon that are not to be found elsewhere. Where do they learn? Who can tell? Possibly the pantomime may be a training-ground for some East End children, but not for many. I certainly never heard of a Millwall child performing on the stage ; and I very much doubt whether one such child in a hundred has ever been to a theatre, even as a spectator. Yet street-dancing in Millwall is a delight to those who have eyes for the beautiful. Accurate, refined, and rhythmical, it is the outward expression of that joy of life which, peculiar to the East-ender, is scarce extinguished after years of untold hardships. On all great occasions and what would be a small occasion elsewhere is a great one in the East End this joy of life gushes forth spon- taneously, A temperance demonstration will evoke it, or a Sunday School excursion, or a yard beano, or a L 2 148 SEVEN YEARS' HARD women's outing, or a religious procession. Where the occasion is, there are the dancers. Ragged and hungry they may be, but they will dance with a religious fervour which puts to shame the paltry evolutions of the drawing-room. Barbara Was at once our pride and our pet. Although only six years old, she was much sought after for all local entertainments. I can see her as I write, diminu- tive, dainty, precise, with a definite intention in her manner that struck the stranger as almost uncanny. Dancing was a serious matter to Barbara. On her knees by her bedside, in her long, white* nightgown, with hands reverently clasped and eyes upraised, she would pray about it : " Please, dear Lord, help me to dance well to- morrow, and make me a good girl. Amen." Asked whether dancing before so many people ever made her nervous, Barbara answered in her precise way, " No ; because I have asked God to help me." An East End ball-room is a pleasant sight. The form is excellent, and a great contrast to the violent scrambles that pass for dancing in many a high-class suburb. The lads are occasionally somewhat of hobbledehoys ; but the girls are almost invariably grace- ful. The scene is a charming one, all colour, light, youthful gaiety and harmonious movement. Farrow, of " Lovely Man " fame, stood transfixed when I suddenly introduced him to one of our " hops." " It is amazing," he said ; " I confess that I never imagined anything like it." He was right ; the thing is unimaginable must be seen to be believed. It is a replica, in cheaper but not less attractive metal, of a similar function in the West. As Potter said to Miss Sacker- by, " What more could they want ? They've every- RECREATIONS 149 thing that heart can desire, even to powder, puff, and hairpins." There exists in all of us, I suppose, in our unregene- rate moments, a desire to monopolise life and think we are doing God service thereby. Occasionally, I have caught myself napping in this respect. I remember overhearing the following conversation between Mylie and a caller : " I want to know about Free's dancing-class, when it's held, and so on." " Thursday," answered Mylie, with her usual brevity. " That'll suit me all right. Tell Mr. Free I'll join. I can dance, you know ; I've had lessons. But a girl gets a bit rusty, and it's so awkward not to know the riggers when you go into Society." I summoned Mylie. " Who was that ? " " Sally Friggins." " Poor Sally ! " I began ; but a doubtful, smouldering light behind Mylie's spectacles, and a twitching of her lips, reminded me of an extraordinary outburst of mirth but a week before. " Thank you," I said ; and as the girl withdrew, I finished my thought " Poor Sally ! Works at the factory for eighteenpence a day, and goes into * Society ' in the evening ! Poor, pathetic Sally ! " And yet, why not ? After all, have not she and her peers as much right to " Society " as anybody ? Why shouldn't Sally enjoy herself in her own way ? Nowhere is the bitter fruit of our brutal class distinctions more evident than in the jealous tendency to " corner " the joys of life. What is to be deprecated with some show of reason is the exaltation of mere amusement at the expense of everything else. There are advanced clubs 150 SEVEN YEARS' HARD in East London which give variety entertainments on Sunday mornings, when old-fashioned folk are at their prayers. One does not wish to be narrow-minded ; but the idea of short-skirt dancing and beer-swilling in the noontide glare of our peaceful English Sunday is somewhat upsetting even to the hardiest of us. But Sally, although no church-goer, would as lief patronise such a place as go barefoot. The East-ender's singing is not so good as his danc- ing, but he seems to get quite as much pleasure out of it. It is not always so enjoyable to the listener, how- ever. The singing of the gangs of lads at the street corners used to be one of the most particular character- istics of Millwall ; and the uncouth noise was apt to give the stranger a curious sense of discomfort. The sudden, unexpected roar of coarse and discordant voices, in the darkness and desolation of the place, was start- ling and bewildering. When a certain social movement was inaugurated here, the servants were so terrified at the nocturnal " singing " that it was difficult to gain admission to the house after dark ; and, during a livelier evening than usual, dear old Mrs. Neighbours, who had been " West " all her life, was so overcome with joy at an unexpected call from my wife, that she forthwith fell a-sobbing on her shoulder. Still more unnerving is the drunken home-coming of a festive party at one or two in the morning. The shrill shrieks of the women, the monotonous howlings of the men, the draggling and shuffling of irresolute, feet, the savage screams which crash into and shatter the sentimental cadences of some well-known melody, combine to form a horror of noise more abominable than anything I have ever imagined. RECREATIONS i ci 5 I was at one time under the common, but erroneous, impression that in the matter of music the East-ender knows what is good. He knows nothing of the kind. How should he ? In my ignorance I would get friends of mine who happened to be endowed with the gift of song to come and give us the benefit of their skill, but I had to abandon that plan. What happened at my con- certs was this. My vocal friends would get on the plat- form, one after another, and sing beautifully, their brilliant performances being received with discreet, very discreet, applause. At the end of twenty minutes of this diplomatic fooling, some one would suddenly call out, " Bill wants to sing * Tim's little doner.' " Then another would shout, " No ! Polly's goin' to give us ' Ow 'e kissed 'er in the gloaminV " On that there would arise a very babel of voices : " Go on, Polly ! " " Buck up, Bill ! ' " Get aiit, all the lot o' you ! I'm not goin' to sing no silly songs," " You give up shovin' o' me, that's all ! " " I've got a cold in my 'ead, I tell you." After five minutes of wrangling, Bill would appear on the platform, flushed, and askew as to collar and tie. With arms behind him, head on one side, eyes half shut, left leg stiff as cast-iron, right leg bent and wriggling, he would emit sundry violent jets of sound, for all the world as if they had been shot from a gun. The audience would take up the chorus until the whole place rocked again ; and, in the midst of the yelling excitement, my musical friends would feel so much out of it that they would humbly pack up their things, insisting that they really must be going. I once asked Mylie if she were fond of singing. " Most," was her answer ; " but not of church singing. Them things you call anthems, they goes up and down 152 SEVEN YEARS' HARD up and down, all mixed, joggled and difficult-like, so that I can't make 'em out nohow." Mylie here voiced a fairly general opinion, I fancy. On another occasion I was expatiating, somewhat verbosely, on the rendering of an important solo by one of our choristers, and begged Mylie's opinion of it. " Not 'arf bad," declared Mylie, with an indulgent grin ; " but of course it wasn't a patch on ' Down the street there is a bloomin' riot/ by that funny feller at Saturday's social. Now, that was lovely" I used to imagine I had a decent voice. In the old days I believe I was rather proud of it. But vanity in this regard was cured before I had been six months in the East End. I was giving my choir boys a lesson in voice-production, their tendency being to keep their mouths shut and their heads on their chests. I stood erect, threw out my chest, opened my mouth wide, and said, " Look at me, lads ; sing like this," at the same time producing, as I supposed, a musical note. I had scarcely finished, when Murrens, an intelligent lad of twelve, who was watching me attentively, began to speak, but seemed to change his mind. " Yes ? " I said, encouragingly. " We have plenty of that kind of thing from father." " Really ! So your father sings, does he ? I am very glad to hear that." " I don't know about singin'" said the boy, with per- fect seriousness ; " but he makes that sort of noise when he yawns." He was a particularly superior kind of lad, was Murrens ; so much so, in fact, that women were always doing their best to spoil him. Yet it was he who confided to me that he had never heard of " God bless the RECREATIONS 153 Prince of Wales," nor of " Men of Harlech " ; but he was anxious to inform me that he knew " God save the Queen." Very few East End lads, I should imagine, are acquainted with the good old British songs which I was brought up to believe to be the precious heritage of every British child. Nevertheless, one can truthfully say that the East- ender is not only fond of music, but is himself, irf his own way, musical. The public-house sing-song of Saturday night, with its yelling choruses and the tap-tap of the chairman's hammer, are familiar and, when one has got used to them, not altogether unpleasant sounds. Women and children are often sweet singers ; and with perseverance it is possible to get together a fairly effective choir. Some of the East End songs are practical, some are sentimental, and some lay claim to being humorous. All are plain, not to say undraped. Take the one with the exciting title, " Those wedding bells shall not ring out." It tells how, at the identical moment in which the lifelong fate of two human beings was about to be sealed, an unwarrantable interruption occurred. There was a shriek of woe, a flashing blade (these things are always " blades "), and the bride and bridegroom (both of them, mind you !) immediately became stone dead, and ranged themselves side by side at the foot of the altar. Again, consider the story of the " Empty Chair." An unfortunate gentleman is left a widower ; but, instead of shedding useless tears, as a less gentlemanly gentleman would have done, he falls back (metaphorically) upon his infant son, and announces his general intentions in the following irreproachable verse : 154 SEVEN YEARS' HARD " But I've a young life to defend ; I will not die a coward's end ; No, no, I'll stick to baby true ; My boy, my child, I still love you." There is the history of the young man who lived " underneath.'' What a world of undeserved worry that young man had ! He seems to have been rather a good young man, too. But, alas ! good young men always have so much trouble. The vagaries of the family on the floor above this young man were beyond all endurance. Their quarrels, their language, their violence, wore the young man to a shadow ; and, to make matters worse, there was a son in that objectionable family who was " A mark on the upper classes, And says he will give them beans ; On the dynamite, all the night, Makes infernal machines." The miseries of the young man " underneath " reached an artistic but intolerable climax on washing-day, when soap-suds drifted through the ceiling and descended gently but firmly upon the young man's unprotected head. The " humorous" song is a firmly established institution in the East End. It is rarely humorous, however, some- times vicious, and almost always vulgar. Of the vicious song I cannot, of course, give examples ; but " The Jilted Shoeblack" may be taken as a type of the humor- ous song. This gentleman informs us that he had been ten years " trotting out a donah," " when another bloke with money comes along " and upsets his matrimonial plans. The lady's ingratitude is lamented in this wise : RECREATIONS 155 " I suppose she won't remember all the cash I said I'd spend, When I walked her off to 'Ampstead all the way ; I suppose she won't remember 'ow I used to pawn her watch, And promise I would take her to the play. " To-day I met 'er suddin', and I said, ' 'Ow are yer, Liz ? ' She looked at me, and then turned up her nose, Me who'd got the 'ome except the furniture and things : She won't remember that, now, I suppose." * Other examples are " I'm getting ready for my mother-in-law," and " We've all been having a go at it." Here is a stanza of the latter, followed by the chorus : " There's some lodgers a-living with us, And they've made such a terrible fuss. They've bought a chicken for dinner to-day, Wanted it cooked I heard them say. Mother she soon cleaned up the hob, Charged 'em a bob for doing the job. When the chicken was cooked oh, lor ! The lodgers came down and I had to roar We've all been having a go at it, All been having a go at it ! Somebody pinched its wings and toes I had a bit off the * parson's nose,' Oh, good gracious ! Didn't we make a show, Seventeen of us besides myself And we've all been having a go." The purely (not impurely) vulgar song is so prevalent as to make any selection difficult. " Let go, Eliza ! " is fairly typical ; and so is " Liza, you are my donah ! You are my little peach ! Meet me round at the fish shop, And I will buy you a penn'orth of each Lor 3 luv yer ! 156 SEVEN YEARS* HARD No bloke dare come and kiss you, Or for Mm I shall go ; If I should lose my temper, Then it's ' What ho ! ' Liza Johnson yes, ' What ho ! ' " * A pattern of song much to be commended as directly making for righteousness, and of increasing popularity, is the eminently practical. This concerns itself with everything, from love to fiscal reform, but exhibits a strong predilection for love. Sometimes it tries its hand at matchmaking : " There's a girl wanted there, there's a girl wanted there, He don't care if she's dark or fair, There's a nice little home that he's willing to share Hurry up, young ladies, and don't be shy ! there's a girl wanted there." * At other times it concerns itself with the exaltation of love for love's sake : " Love is more than gold to me, I don't want your L.S.D., I just want the girl I love, believe me on my word, I don't want your wealth and land, I don't want your mansion grand, It's not the cage I'm after, it's the bird." Anon, taking as its thesis " You can get a sweetheart any day, but not another mother," it informs us prettily that " There's an old-fashioned cottage with ivy round the door, A quaint old kitchen with sand upon the floor ; There's a dear old lady, and, wherever I may roam, I think of my mother and my dear old home." * Then it proceeds to do justice to "daddy," in the role of little son's companion : RECREATIONS 157 " I love daddy, my dear daddy And I know that he loves me : He's my playmate rain or shine, There ain't another daddy in the world like mine." Or as ennobled by his daily toil for those he loves : " ' My daddy's a gentleman he's dressed fine ; My daddy don't go to work at half-past nine,' Then the other maid replied, ' That's quite true, But my daddy, you see, Works for mother and me, So my daddy's a gentleman, too.'"* But of all the East End songs, the sentimental has the firmest grip on public favour. Here, again, one suffers from an embarrassment of riches. There's the person " that nobody loves at all," although, contradic- torily enough, " everybody's loved by some one." There's the small boy who, when caught travelling in the train without a ticket, assures the soft-hearted conductor that he is on his way to see his (the small boy's) dying mother. And there's that other small boy who addresses the skylark after this fashion : " If, among the angels, mother you should see, Ask her if she will come down again to poor dear daddy and me." * Curiously enough, morality is often at a serious discount in the sentimental song. Doing evil that good may come is openly, if indirectly, advocated. In " It only makes me love her all the more," the over-fond one sings " Once she pinched a watch and then she sold it ; People called her ' thief,' but still It wasn't for herself, but for a pal of hers, Who laid at home so ill." 158 SEVEN YEARS' HARD And another gentleman, sick of the same fever, consoles himself for his partner's frequent infirmities with the reflection that " She's my wife, and I took her for better or worse ; She's my wife, be she blessing or be she a curse ; Good or bad, I "will stick to her while I have life ; I took her for better or worse, you know, and she's my wife." * Of course, the main theme of the sentimental song is love, love, and love all the time : " Because I love you ! Because I love you ! My life knows no regret, e'en tho' we have not met. True time shall prove you, no one above you, I cannot you forget, because I love you." The writers of these ditties ring the changes liberally enough ; but the peal is always the same, musical as far as it goes, but limited. The " other woman " is not forgotten : " Are we to part like this, Bill, are we to part this way ? Who's it to be, 'er or me ? Don't be a-frightened to say ! If ev'ry thing's over between us, don't never pass me by, 'Cos you and me still friends can be, for the sake of the days gone by." Nor is the young lady named Mignonette, who wasn't to forget he loved her yet, although she much preferred the other fellow ; nor the " bird in a gilded cage," who looked happy but was nothing of the kind, her beauty having been " sold for an old man's gold " ; nor that dear girl " Sweetheart May," who, like so many dear girls of a similar type, had no proper sense of duty, or surely she would have stuck to her boy-lover and not have gone and married somebody else. The sentimental song RECREATIONS 159 holds such imperial sway because East End life is for the most part lacking in all that makes for emotion and tenderness. The sentimental song fills the empty places in the hearts of a people whose culture is limited, but whose loves and hates are as deep and real as those of the rest of the world. I cannot leave this subject without saying a word about the patriotic song. From the blood of the slain on the battle-fields of South Africa sprang a sense of brotherhood new to the East End. As, day by day, the newspaper unfolded the development of affairs, heaping horror upon horror of calamitous defeat, men who had hitherto been strangers to the sense of patriotism were stirred to their souls' depths with love of their country. What more natural than that they should express this new-found emotion in song? In quick succession came many a heart-stirring appeal for unity, for the forgetting of old hatreds in the common cause of brotherly love ; and " What do you think of the Irish now ? " " Bravo ! Dublin Fusiliers ! " and many other challenges of a similar kind were the outward signs of the leavening process going on in the nation's heart. And when, after weeks of weary waiting, came tidings of the relief of Mafeking, the deadly indifference of East London broke forth into noble enthusiasm. " On the Wall " the intelligence arrived late ; and most of us were abed when the river sirens and the factory bells, first mildly and modestly as if half afraid of their own voices, then boldly, defiantly, clamorously, announced the glorious tidings. Downstairs three steps at a time went I. Into the church I ran, and there, in the solemn dark- ness of it, set to work ringing the bell as I had never rung it before. My wife was rushing from door to door, 160 SEVEN YEARS' HARD crying, " Get up ! Get up ! Mafeking is relieved. Come to church ! Come and thank God ! " Never was such a congregation as we had that night. Men reeking with fumes of beer and tobacco, women wrapped in shawls because they had had no time to dress themselves, children shivering from their first sleep, with one accord they answered the summons. I slipped on my surplice, crept humbly to the altar, and poured out my soul in such words as came. And when I sat down to the organ and played over the Old Hundredth, and that heterogeneous assembly of human beings " praised God from whom all blessings flow," it was as if a great sorrow had been lifted from the hearts of a united family. Inspiring? I believe you! The walls of " Little St. Cuthbert's " will listen for a long time before they hear such music again. CHAPTER VII WORK AND WAGE THERE are some curious methods of getting one's living in the East End. Perhaps the strangest of all is that of the pawnbroker's tout. Touting of this kind is woman's work. Proud man will not soil his hands with the degrading business. Yet I never heard that the brute was content with less than the lion's share of the profits. Stella Prince was a tout. I made Stella's acquaintance some seven years ago. She stopped me in the street one day, and asked me, in a pitiful, despairing way, if I could " do anything " with her husband. She had two black eyes, and her cheeks were of a ghastly pallor. I " did something " with her husband ; but at the last moment she would not prose- cute, and so the case fell through. After that, things went from bad to worse with Stella. Her husband drank away nearly all his earnings ; in his delirium he beat her mercilessly. While he was sleeping off the stupor of the night's debauch, his children and hers would be crying for food. The woman looked hither and thither for employment, and at length found it in that which only the lowest of her class would descend to. Henceforth, every Monday morning saw her collect- M 1 62 SEVEN YEARS' HARD ing from house to house the oddest imaginable assort- ment of articles : pots, pans, pictures, ornaments, bits of finery, clothes mostly clothes. Henceforth, every Saturday night saw her collecting pence from door to door, slinking down to the pawnshop, and presently emerging bent double under her heavy burden. Poor Stella ! What a woman you might have been under happier circumstances ! When I have met you with those hideous bulging bundles under your ragged shawl, how my heart has ached for you ! You never saw me at those times you could not. The shame of your shameful profession was heavy on you. You realised that, in the eyes of the world, there was for you but one step of infamy below that which you had taken. And your little ones the thin, pale-faced boy who helped to carry the " things," and who always greeted me with a royal smile ; and the wisp of girlhood who seemed to share the horror of your misery and your passionate desire to hide it what of them ? God help you, my sister ! For there is no help for you from man. Another shady profession is the crimp's. Jack Tar is merry but not wise, and the crimp is the parasite that feeds on his folly. When Jack " signs on," it is customary for him to receive a note of hand cashable after his ship has sailed. This method was invented to save the simple creature from himself; for, in earlier days, it was the custom to give him a month's wages in advance, and the fool got drunk on the strength of it, and missed his ship. But the crimp, who frequently keeps the beer-shop, is equal to the new arrangement, and for a consideration will cash the advance notes at sight. So Jack still arrives on board penniless. In the East End there are numberless working-men WORK AND WAGE 163 who are " Jack Tars " in nature if not in name. Need- less to say, there is no lack of swindlers to fleece them. Blunt, whose character as an affectionate husband I once vindicated in the teeth of twelve suspicious jury- men, crimps his fellow-workmen. His method is simplicity itself. Let the reader remember that the working-man of Saturday is a different creature from the working-man of Monday. On Saturday he is generous, open-handed, happy as a king ; on Monday he is morose, close-fisted, gloomy as a comedian on a holi- day. From Monday to Saturday he is in the depths. The public-house doors stand wide, but they serve only to tantalise his appetite : his pockets are absolutely empty. To him, in his deplorable plight, comes Blunt, like an angel of light, with a plan of immediate relief. " Take this little brass disk," says he to the thirsty one, after the manner of a conjurer, " present it at yonder bar, and the results will surprise you." " How much ? " asks the thirsty one. " Sixpence, please, on Saturday," says Blunt. " My Gawd ! " exclaims the thirsty one, smacking his lips, grabbing the disk, and darting into the beer-shop. " My conscience ! " says Blunt, at the thought of his 6,000 per cent, profit. Enough of the shady side of work. Let us turn to the consideration of the bond fide toiler. The East End is the [workshop of London. There, everything that can be made is made, not excepting fortunes, which, for the most Tpart, the fortune-makers keep to themselves. Consider, for example, this hive of industry, the Isle of Dogs. What a wealth of production it can boast ! Ships, from the lordly man-o'-war to the humble-minded barge ; all that appertains to ships masts and oars, M 2 164 SEVEN YEARS' HARD sails and ropes, tanks and cisterns, blocks and steering- gear, casks and tarpaulin. Here pickles are made, and paint, boilers and sacks, chemicals and wire-netting, dis- infecting fluids and lead, encaustic tiles, railway sleepers, barrels and bottles ; here are varnish works and lubricat- ing oil works, foundries for brass and iron, copper works, smelting and gold-ore works, timber yards and fibre works. And the Isle of Dogs is typical of the whole of the East End. In this unknown land, men, women and children labour strenuously for the meat that perishes in order that they themselves may live. Theirs is the incessant toil, the labour that does not physic pain, the meagre meal eaten in discomfort, the unhomelike home. Oh, their wonderful patience ! What a sight it is to see them streaming from work at close of day. They are so tired, so hot and grimy, yet so light-hearted withal, that it makes one glad, even as it makes one sad, merely to look at them. To get work, to do it, to keep it : these are the three requisites of the toiler's life ; and of the three the get- ting is the most important. So far from shirking work, the goal of the respectable working-man, passion- ately striven for, is to secure it. He is painfully aware of the wolf of hunger at the door, cruel and blood- thirsty, waiting for the slightest chance to force an entrance. Be his work, therefore, never so unhealthy, never so exacting, the radiant smile will light up his face with very gratitude. Only when it fails does the light fail. The respectable working-man out of work quickly degenerates. His gait grows slovenly, his speech halting. The better man he is, the harder is his failure to bear. He falls farther than the sluggard because he has farther to fall ; he rises more slowly because he has WORK AND WAGE 165 fewer to help him up. For, strange as it may seem, it is often easier for a careless man to get work than for a steady man. The good-for-nought frequents the public- houses and the clubs ; he has a crowd of pot-compan- ions. But the steady man is a stay-at-home, known neither to club nor pub. His foreman is not always partial to him ; he is not popular with his fellows. I have known a man of excellent character and ability remain out of employment for months together, while the ne'er-do-well would drift, haphazard, from place to place, never lacking a bed or a meal or a glass of beer especially a glass of beer. The respectable man may have served a firm faithfully for twenty years ; but a tiff with his superior, an accident, a serious illness, or even a slight one, will settle his business. Fear of the future kills the working-man. Rivers was one of those whom it is an honour to have known. Industrious, upright, highly intelligent, he was employed in one firm for the whole of his life. Yet the fear of the future killed him. " My wife and children," were the words most frequently on his lips during his days of health. " My wife and children," were the words that spoke in his eyes as he lay dying in the London Hospital. It is the uncertainty that kills. Take the case of Cartwright. I felt that young fellow's death as if it had been that of my own brother. He was terribly ill, yet he would stick to his work. " Rest, my dear boy," said I. " Let me send you into the country for three months. You will come back a new man." " How can I ? " was his answer. " If I give up, I'm done for. There are a dozen men ready to step into my shoes. What will become of the missus and the kids ? I must hold on." 1 66 SEVEN YEARS' HARD He held on. It was pitiful. He had a pretty wife and three bonny children. I begged a few guineas from friends, and sent him off to a celebrated physician. He returned radiant : the doctor had promised him life, I remember how he repeated the word again and again, laughing aloud with joy, " Life ! life ! " " Merely a matter of time," he said. I had other thoughts. The days passed. He grew weaker, weaker ; but he would not give in. The night before he died he made ready for another visit to the doctor. He was too feeble to walk twenty yards ; so it was arranged that he should have a cab. A cab in Millwall ! Carefully and methodically he prepared for the morrow : what he was to wear, when he was to start, what he was to say. He could not speak above a whisper ; his breath came sharp and quick ; his face was livid ; but he was as cheerful as a cricket. " It'll be all right," he said, with a bright smile. " Merely a matter of time, you know. I must hold on." Next morning I was called to his bedside. It was eleven o'clock ; he was to have started at ten. " Hullo, old chap, what's this ? " " Just a bit done up," he gasped. " Better presently." He didn't care for me to pray with him. He had never been one of that sort, he said ; no good in pretending. A little later I saw him again. He was so bright that I was perplexed. " Do you know you are dying ? " I said. He looked at me steadily for a minute. Then, speak- ing clearly amid the thick come-and-go of his breath, he answered : " Not me ! He'll pull me through all right. Didn't he promise ? I must hold on for the sake of the missus and the kids." WORK AND WAGE 167 A while after he muttered, " Can't understand it at all. What have I got to go for? Always straight. Done nothing to be ashamed of. Carit understand it." " Nor I. But we'll say ' Our Father,' eh ? " He signified assent. His people crowded silently into the room. We stumbled through the Lord's Prayer together. " Can't understand it, all the same," he repeated, when we had finished. " Fair puzzle to me. But I must hold on." He held on for two hours longer. Then he passed over. A brave, strong, noble soul ! The respectable working-man goes in perpetual dread of the future. Sickness means starvation or the work- house ; and in his estimation there is not much to choose between them. So there are few holidays for him, and few minutes in the long day wherein he may seek relaxation from the daily grind. He rises from bed, and he goes to work ; he comes from work, and he goes to bed. There are not many spaces in his life. It is hard and dreary ; it would be altogether impossible but for that sleepless wolf howl- ing incessantly at the door. He works overtime when- ever possible, the restrictions of the law being quietly ignored by his employer. Sunday is an unwelcome holiday, and so are the two or three days in the year consecrated to booze by his fellow-labourers ; besides which, there is always the possibility of a ruined day when one is dependent upon a lazy or drunken mate. The respectable working-man would willingly forego rest of every kind could he rake together a few extra shillings for his wife and little ones. Robinson occurs to me as an example. During the five years he was at 1 68 SEVEN YEARS' HARD Liddell's he had only three days " off," and he was not particularly keen even about them. The working-man is further hampered by the system of blackmail to which men occupying posts of trust and responsibility unblushingly condescend. The foreman holds the lives of the workers in his hands, and sells to the highest bidder. Even when a man has secured a job, he must bribe his foreman if he would keep it. " I never lowered myself to that," said Binder, " but many of my mates have done so. They are there " he ex- tended his knotted hands with a pathetically eloquent gesture : " I am here." Many highly respectable firms pay their men labourers' wages, say sevenpence an hour, while they charge their clients mechanics' wages, say eightpence-halfpenny an hour. Complaint would spell dismissal. The wise worker keeps his thoughts to himself. I know of a man whose average earnings were eighteen shillings a week. Having a wife and children dependent on him, he was naturally on the look-out for any means of increasing this meagre pittance. Hearing of a watchman's job for a single night, he jumped at it, although the weather was bitterly cold. For this service half-a-crown was actually paid, but only one-and-sixpence found its way into this poor fellow's pocket. " I am a living witness that black- mailing of the kind does exist ; God help you to expose it ! " a working-man wrote to me, and enclosed his dinner money for a sick brother who had been victimised by this atrocious system. One dark December day I was called in to see Lemon. He was ill and starving. The charitable society to which he had applied for relief would have nothing to do with him because, having examined the books of the WORK AND WAGE 169 firm where he had been employed, they had made the interesting discovery that his earnings were larger than he had represented them to be. So Lemon was written down a liar, and his application was rejected. Having my doubts as to the justice of this decision, I invited a working-man friend to a smoke and a chat. At an opportune moment I broached the matter of Lemon. My friend smiled and said, " Oh, that's a regular thing. Of course, the governors don't know anything about it, or, if they do, think it best to keep their eyes shut. It's like this : ' plush profits,' as they are called, are regarded by the foreman as his ' perks ' (perquisites), and to all intents and purposes are a tax on the men under him. Say a man earns twenty-five shillings a week. Well, the foreman will pay him twenty-four shillings and pocket the shilling ; but he will enter the whole twenty-five shillings on the firm's books to the man's credit." The working-man's lot is hard indeed ; but, if possible, that of the working-woman is still harder. Two typical cases will suffice to illustrate my point. Mrs. Laverstick, a widow of sixty, worked at Scamper's. Her hours were fifty-six per week ; namely, ten on five days and six on one day (Saturday). Her earnings were exactly nine shillings, or not quite twopence an hour. The dinner-time was not paid for, and there was no interval for tea. The floor of the room in which Mrs. Laverstick worked streamed with water, the air reeked with steam, and the fumes of acid caused her poor old eyes to shed abundant tears. Normally, hair, clothes, and feet were wringing wet. She could not stand this sort of thing for ever, poor soul ! So she left Scamper's and took to making grommets, hempen rings used in bolting. When 170 SEVEN YEARS' HARD in good form, she could make a grommet a minute ; and I have known her to make three hundred of these little rings before eleven o'clock in the morning ; but she had to get up at half-past three, and work for several hours by candle-light, to do it. Fourpence a hundred, or about twopence an hour, was her wage, twine being provided. The other typical case is that of Mrs. Coventry. One day, shortly after the death of her husband, I met her looking miserably ill and unhappy. Contrary to her usual custom, she would have passed me, but I stopped her with a look and a word. There were great black rings round her eyes ; her figure was bent as if with age. She seemed dwarfed, deformed. What was the matter ? I asked. Thereupon, in a dull, monotonous voice, she began the old story of pinching poverty, expatiating on the number of weeks' rent she owed, the clothes and bedding "put away" (euphemism for ".pawned "), and so on ; and she was dropping into rosy reminiscences of the past gladdened by a husband who regularly earned twenty-two shillings a week, when I caught sight of her fingers and uttered an involuntary exclamation. At that she paused, and stretched out her hands for me to see ; and the tears so long held back brimmed over in a scalding flood of self-pity. It was a shocking sight that I looked upon. There was nothing human about her hands. The fingers were odiously discoloured ; the nails were torn and worn to the quick ; the joints were knotted and gnarled like those of some hideous abortion. I shuddered. " How much ? " I asked, in the staccato of repressed emotion. "You see, I'm not up to the work," answered Mrs. Coventry. " Yest'y, it took me from eight to half-past WORK AND WAGE 171 eleven to do as 'ard a bit o' work as I ever done in my life, and I got twopence-halfpenny for it ; and after dinner I worked up to seven o'clock an* earnt fivepence. Total earnings for the day," said Mrs. Coventry, with quivering lips and a succession of little sobs that shook her " total earnings for the day, sevenpence-halfpenny, s'elp me, God ! " So help her, God ! She and her kind stand in dire need of it. And the child-worker? What is bad for grown-up persons is still worse for growing boys and girls. Theirs is the mental pain arising from the sharpness of the contrast between limited ability and unlimited demands. One can guess but faintly what it must be for the work- ing boy or girl to have to battle day by day with in- herent weakness physical, moral, mental and yet keep the head above water in a kind of death-struggle. Theirs, too, is that terror of losing the means of liveli- hood which makes existence almost unbearable. When Cory was but sixteen years old, he worked, months on end, for seven days a week, despite the rigid law respect- ing holidays. On Sunday evenings he would turn up in choir, looking so fagged that I was often tempted to send him home again, and would have done so but for the pleading in his eyes. " Why should you work on Sunday when you don't want to ? " I would say to him. His invariable reply was a shrug of the shoulders. " But why ? " I would insist. His dark eyes would overflow as he answered : " I'd like to see myself arguing with Sampson. It'd be, ' Aiit you go, then ! ' " Cringle, another of my lads, met with a serious accident at his work. Shortly afterwards, I fell in with 172 SEVEN YEARS' HARD him hobbling along with great difficulty. His face was white and drawn. " Surely you've not been to work ? " I said. " Had to, unless I wanted the sack," was the laconic answer. But perhaps the hardest lot of all is that of the factory-girl ; and that because she has less force to rough it than the man or the boy, and less wisdom than the woman, while her wage is contemptible. When the East End lassie leaves school, she generally goes into a "little place." In the "little place" she has to be nursemaid, housemaid, cook, and occasionally shop- assistant. She begins early, and she finishes late. However good her intentions may be, fate is too exact- ing for her. In six months she has degenerated into an ill-conditioned, discontented, lazy slut. She throws up the " little place," and goes into a " sweating " factory. In that delectable mansion she mixes with the lowest kind of girl going, and learns to love foul and foolish things. The " little place " offers no sort of training for girls ambitious to serve in good houses ; and no self- respecting mistress would take a girl as domestic servant from the pigsty of the factory. As a general rule, the factory-girl lives far from her work, and is therefore obliged to walk several miles every day. The north-east wind may blow its bitterest ; rain or snow may fall its swiftest ; the mud may lie ankle-deep in the roadway, the pavements stream with rivulets. It matters not. Long before the grey of dawn steals over the sleeping city, the factory-girl must rise from her wretched bed, fling on her threadbare clothes, and set off on her long tramp. She clip-clops along the deserted streets, keenly conscious that the WORK AND WAGE 173 gates will close sharp on the hour, and that to be twenty seconds late will ruin her whole day. Sleepily she stumbles along, dreaming of the coming Saturday night and the long rest of Sunday ; and as she dreams and stumbles, she arrives at the factory. She is swept through the gates in a vortex of evil-smelling petticoats and shawls, as the clamour of many-tongued bells dies away and the work of the day begins. For five hours at a stretch she must labour. The atmosphere of the working-room may be so pungent that the eyes may run with water. With every breath she draws she may be inhaling, through those parted lips of hers, myriads of tiny particles of fibrous stuff that set her coughing and coughing, until one of these days she will cough her lungs away. She may not sit down : the keen eyes of her forewoman are upon her. Like a slave of old time, she must go on with her work, be it never so exhausting, mechanical, degrading. At one o'clock she will be released for dinner. At two she will be back again ; and from that time until seven she will go on without a break. Let the reader note in passing, that the only interval allowed for food must be paid for by the factory-girl and not by her employer. The great firm cannot spare even an hour, so that the serf who is making them rich shall be permitted to give her starving stomach something to go on: "If you won't work eleven hours at a stretch, but will insist on a whole hour for rest and food, then pay for your food and pay for your rest you'll get no pennies out of us." And what will her dinner be like ? Well, it may consist of the bread and margarine she has brought from home, or of a penn'orth of fried fish and a ha'p'orth of bread bought at the fish-shop near by. In any case, 174 SEVEN YEARS' HARD in view of the fact that very few girls can spend as much as threepence on their mid-day meal, it is safe to conjecture that it will be insufficient in quantity and inferior in quality, although extremely appetising. In a certain part of the East End, not a hundred miles from Millwall, there was, when I first knew it, no place in which the many hundreds of factory- girls employed by a neighbouring firm could eat their dinner in decency, to say nothing of comfort. To exaggerate the danger run by these workers in passing from steam- ing kitchens and suffocating rooms into wind or rain, sleet or snow, would be impossible. Scantily clad and half-fed, they fell an easy prey to disease. It was the duty of their employers to provide them with shelter ; but for years their employers had shirked that duty, leaving to private philanthropy, earnest but insufficient, the task that rightly belonged to themselves. The coup de grace to this unsatisfactory state of affairs was at length given by two practical philanthropists and myself. We sent to the firm in question a joint letter, which was in the nature of an ultimatum : " If you don't provide a dining-room for your girls, we shall do so-and-so." The effect was magical. Within twenty-four hours a large room was in process of transformation ; and a few days later some hundreds of girls sat down to dinner for the first time under cover. It was but a partial victory, for the comparatively small space at disposal limited the number of diners ; but it was a victory all the same, and an earnest, let us hope, of greater triumphs to come. Let me give a few illustrations of the working life of girls I know well. Alice Torby, commonly called " Topsy," works in the same factory as that in which Mrs. Laverstick worked until she broke down. Her average WORK AND WAGE 175 wage is eight shillings a week, or not quite seven farthings an hour ; but, as she puts in a good deal of overtime, frequently working on Saturdays until ten at night, she will, for such weeks, take as much as ten shillings and sixpence. There is only one break in the day for Topsy, namely, from one till two, except during overtime, when half an hour is allowed for tea. Topsy stands at her work all day long, and, if caught attempting to sit, is liable to a " jawing." Pauline, aged seventeen, works at one of the very best factories in the East End. Not long ago, sorely against her will, because she was afraid that her earnings would fall below their normal standard of eight shillings a week, she was obliged to adopt a new system of piece- work, and was paid a penny and an eighth for her part in the packing of every hundred packets of tea. From eight in the morning until eight at night, for three terrible days, she worked like a veritable nigger, straining every nerve to keep up to her standard of earnings. On the Thursday she collapsed. For her forty-two and a half hours' work she earned exactly four and twopence, and she dealt with no fewer than 3,400 packets. This is the kind of work that kills. For soldering a hundred tins, a child of fourteen can earn twopence- halfpenny. Think of it. Twopence-halfpenny for two hours of such work ! And the delicate ringers bleeding, and the delicate wrists burnt ! How many hundreds of tins, my lady, must be soldered before the price of your new gown could be paid for ? How many thousands of tins, my lord, before you could defray the cost of one night's merry-making ? A girl can solder five hundred tins a day, for which she will receive one shilling and a halfpenny. At the end of the week, Saturday being i 7 6 SEVEN YEARS' HARD a short day, she will take six shillings for her six days' work. How far will six shillings go ? Obviously, if one is to live by soldering tins, many more than five hundred a day must be soldered. I know a woman who, on her first day, soldered a thousand tins ; on the second, she could manage no more than eight hundred and fifty ; the third day showed a further drop to seven hundred ; and when Saturday came, exhausted in body, despair- ing in soul, the poor creature had but eight shillings and ninepence to take home to her fatherless bairns. To the frantic eagerness of the underpaid worker to make sufficient to live on, somehow, anyhow, is doubt- less due a large proportion of the terrible accidents for which our factories are notorious. Certainly the glamour of " high wages " tempts into that death-trap, the white- lead factory, many who, in normal circum- stances, would as lief work in a sewer. Some such firms bait their hooks with a free and appetising breakfast, but the price the poor worker has to pay for such " liberality " is health and even life itself. Eyes grow lustreless, hands useless, one after another the faculties of body and mind decay, and the end of the miserable victim is the grave. Lead kills surely, although slowly. It is to the advantage of the employer not to advertise the fact ; there is a quite natural tendency to hush up such cases as occasionally become public. But those who live among the workers know how difficult it would be to exaggerate the evils of lead-poisoning. I once spent a couple of hours in the midst of thousands of tons of lead. " Mind you don't touch it ! " said my guide, warningly ; " it's beastly stuff. It creeps under the nails ; it distils into the system. Before you know where you are, WORK AND WAGE 177 well, you've seen things yourself, haven't you ? " Seldom is it that one gets such an honest expression of opinion. Manufacturer and worker are in league to conceal the facts ; the manufacturer for obvious reasons, the worker because he is afraid of losing his place. Lead-poisoning is nevertheless a fact, although difficult of proof. The process of degeneration is so slow as to be almost im- perceptible. But the gradual assimilation of small quantities of lead, as is well known, is more fatal than the rapid absorption of larger quantities. Woe to the poor wretch in whom the deadly work has begun ! I imagine my readers to be wondering whether I am adhering to the strict truth in the foregoing statements. It seems incredible to them that the toilers of the East End should be so hounded and harried, that they should be so overworked and so underpaid, that they should be left so wholly in the hands of tyrannical jacks-in-office, who would not know how to treat a rat, much less a human being. They are recalling vague impressions of Acts of Parliament passed for the protection of the worker. " How can these things be while there is a law in the land ? " they are asking themselves. Well, they can be, and are, simply because human nature is human nature, and the battle is to the strong. It is wonderful how many laws a rich man may break with impunity, and how few a poor man. The explana- tion of the existing practice as to overtime, for instance (to take one of the many abuses which embitter the toiler's life), is due to what may be regarded in the light of an accident. There are occasions, the reader must know, when even a few hours' delay may mean ruin to certain manufactures. At such times, half as much labour again may be required as on normal occasions. N 178 SEVEN YEARS' HARD To meet such exceptional circumstances, the Factories and Workshops Act was modified with respect to factories dealing in perishable goods, such as fruit, fish, and condensed milk, and allowed an employer, in cases of " emergency," to keep his employes at work beyond the stipulated hours. But, in view of the essential selfishness of human nature, the result, to all who possess more than an academic acquaintance with the conditions of labour, was a foregone conclusion. For the word " emergency " is found to possess wonderfully elastic properties, and, while the employer of labour is relieved of the trouble and expense of seeking extra workers, the labourer himself is forced to work against his will and strength. So, from June to September, the sweater is helped by the civil law to break the moral law, and may systematically overwork his workers and yet be held blameless. The Act might have been framed for his protection, and not for that of the worker. Under the aegis of this questionable charter of the people's liberties, young people may be kept at hard labour for, practically, the round of the clock. It is not an impossible thing for a girl to work for seventeen hours in a day ; and I know of a case where a mere child was forced to " put in " twenty consecutive hours, namely, from eight o'clock on Saturday morning to four o'clock on Sunday morning. Nothing could more clearly demonstrate the evil effect of the " emergency " clause in the Act than a comparison between the worker in a factory dealing with perishable goods and the worker in a factory concerned with the weaving of fabrics. For instance, if there is pressure of work in a textile factory, the factory-girl goes on with her duties comfortably assured that she WORK AND WAGE 179 will not be asked to do more than her share. Not so with the girl in a non-textile factory. She is in constant dread of being forced to work overtime, to turn her day's honest toil into a day of degrading and exhausting slavery. Again, the girl in a textile factory works in large rooms well supplied with fresh air ; she has regular intervals for rest and food ; sanitation and ven- tilation are equally well attended to. The girl in a non- textile factory is in a very different position. She is often obliged to work under the most distressing conditions. Times for meals are ruthlessly cut down. She may not have even a crust in her pocket to nibble at ; for, in factories where comestibles are under preparation, it is customary to impose a no-eating rule during work-time. Frequently the workrooms are small and ill-ventilated, their walls running with water, their floors streaming with refuse. Hair, clothes, and feet are constantly saturated ; and dangerous falls on the slippery floors, resulting in sprains and bruises, are so frequent as to excite no comment save the inevitable oath. The fact is that the old saying, that you may drive a coach-and-four through any Act of Parliament, seems to have been invented for an Act ostensibly framed for the protection of the worker. To take concrete examples. The law says that a twelve hours' worker in a non- textile factory must have an hour and a half for meals. My little friend, " Chirpy " Titmarsh, who works at a non-textile factory, is allowed no more than an hour. The law says that such a worker must not work at a stretch for more than five hours. " Chirpy " works for six and seven hours at a stretch. The law says that " a young person " (from fourteen to eighteen years of age) is not to work overtime unless under N 2 180 SEVEN YEARS' HARD exceptional circumstances. As a matter of fact, " Chirpy," who has not yet seen her sixteenth year, is being worked to death because she has to choose between that and no work at all. The law says that " a woman " (a person at least eighteen years old) may work for two hours' overtime including a half-hour interval after five o'clock for not more than three days a week, and thirty days (in the case of fruit, fish, and other perishable articles, fifty days) a year. As a matter of fact, Chirpy's widowed mother is being worked under practically no conditions save the limits of her endur- ance. All these things the law says, and all these things are treated with quiet indifference by the employer of labour who is still so unregenerate as to regard the voluntary work of the worker in the light of the com- pulsory toil of the slave. Will it be believed, moreover, that firms who grind the faces of the poor, deliberately deprive the workers of a portion even of their miserable earnings ? We all know the evils of " truck," that system of imposition which is said to have fined a weaver half-a- crown for slaking with a cup of cold water the burning thirst induced by working in a tem- perature of 90 ; but the pettiness of the fines imposed by some sweating firms almost surpasses belief. Sup- posing, for example, a girl makes a great effort, and earns, with overtime, ten-and-fivepence-halfpenny in one week. When she presents herself at the pay-desk, she will receive, not ten-and-sixpence, not even ten-and-five- pence-halfpenny, but ten-and-fivepence, the extra half- penny presumably finding its way into pockets that have no possible right to it. Sometimes the extortion is on a far more extensive scale. Emily Craboose worked WORK AND WAGE 181 for fifty-five hours for eight shillings. Because she declined to give up her Saturday half-holiday and work for fifty-seven hours, she was docked of more than two hours' earnings, and received only seven-and-eight- pence ! " But why don't you insist on getting your proper wage ? " I have said again and again. The answer has always been the same " Not me ! unless I want to get the sack." Tyranny of the kind is very general. Children may be kept in a condition of abject terror, week in and week out, by the overbearing brutality of a forewoman. A girl came to me for a hospital letter. She was very ill ; I could see that at a glance. She could not speak above a whisper. Obviously she had once been beautiful ; but disease had laid its paralysing finger upon her, and the drooping eyelids, the chalky skin, the shrivelled bust, all told the same sad story. The cause of her illness declared itself at once ; she brought into the room a suffocating stench that stopped the breath. Clothes, hair, her very flesh was saturated with the malodorous poison. No need for her to explain. " What hospital ? " I asked ; and, " In- or out-patient ? " "It ain't likely as I can go in," she said with a hoarse chuckle. " Aiit's good enough for me ; as much as I can manage, I guess." I filled in an out-patient's letter for the Victoria Park Hospital, and the girl backed out of my study, smiling awkwardly but gratefully. Next day she brought back the letter, the envelope of which had become unrecognisably grubby. " What's the matter ? " I asked, looking anxiously at the anaemic, colourless face. 1 82 SEVEN YEARS* HARD " 'Tain't no use," she said ; " she won't 'ave it nohow. You should 'ave seen 'er face when I arst orf to go to the 'orspital. ' Knock me daiin with a feather ! ' says she. An' you could, too. So I see as it meant the sack, and cries orf." The extreme probability is that such a girl will struggle on for six months or so, collapse, and die pre- maturely ; or, worse still, endure long years of terrible weakness and uselessness. There are girls in the East End who are actually dying on their feet because they are afraid to be away from their work a single day. What we have to face, speaking generally, is the innate selfishness of the employer of labour. There are, of course, noble exceptions, but these only prove the rule. Here, as elsewhere, the individual is untrust- worthy. It is futile for the objector to honest criticism to point out the increasing humanitarianism exhibited in certain quarters : the reduction of hours of labour, the adoption of elaborate preventives of disease and death, the schemes for the compensation of the injured and for the relief of the broken in health. It is not an imperti- nent question to ask, " Have such firms taken these humane and business-like measures voluntarily, or under compulsion ? " And if it be provable, as I think it is, that such exalted conceptions of duty did not occur to employers of labour until the State had assumed a threatening attitude, we need not waste our breath in eulogising the unselfishness of those whose only object is to squeeze from the worker the largest possible amount of money-making energy for the smallest possible pay. The evils are all on the side of the worker, the benefits all on the side of the employer. Nemesis WORK AND WAGE 183 would drive the employer to ruin were not the slave- market practically inexhaustible. When a worker col- lapses, he is tossed aside like a dirty dish-clout, and applicants trample each other down in the struggle for the vacant place. The employer will not regard this as a hardship. He will declare that " business must be attended to." Even he, so he will assure us, is occasionally obliged to work when he does not want to, and under conditions which are injurious to his health. Competition, he will tell us, is as keen among employers as among workers. Very well. Be it so. So far, employer and worker are alike. But is the employer under-fed, ill-clothed, wretchedly housed? Has he nothing to look forward to at the end of his life-long toil but penury? If he shows signs of failing strength, is he liable to lose the chance of earning his living alto- gether? If so, the cases are identical, and we must extend to the master the same sympathy that we give to the servant. But the cases are not identical. For the most part, the employer has a superabundance of this world's goods. He is clad in purple and fine linen, and fares sumptuously every day. Moreover, his future is assured : humanly speaking, it is impossible for him to end his days in the workhouse. The worker is the victim of a tradition. He is mown down before the pestilential breath of spongy sentiment. " Business must be attended to." That is one of the copy-book moralities which work his ruin. " The law of supply and demand must be submitted to." That is another. There are hundreds of them. But they all mean one thing, namely, that the worker is an inferior person who must be treated in an inferior way in order to make the superior person still more superior. 184 SEVEN YEARS' HARD True, there are faults on both sides. There are lazy workers as well as indifferent and oppressive employers. But what, after all, can we expect ? Take the majority of the workers of a great industrial centre like the East End. Dwarfed in mind and body, untrained, uncultured, mere children as regards the stage of development they have reached, are we right in expecting of them the reasoning powers, the breadth of view, the charity, the long-suffering which are ours by right of birth ? Faults on both sides? Of course there are. But I contend that we expect too much of the workers. What chance have they, after all, of learning duty, honesty, reverence ? Be it ours, as their elder brothers in the great human family, to lead them, with infinite patience and unfailing love, out of their cramped life into the liberties of the children of God. In spite of all that has been said about the life of noble toil, work, if not properly regulated, is debasing. From such a point of view it is not impossible to understand what Slingsby's sister meant when, on being invited to join our Church Cleaners' League, she declined on the ground that it was so " 'umblin'." In a district like Millwall, where the only perfumes are those emanating from the chimneys of asbestos, oil, and lead works ; where the only music is the clanging and hammering of iron in the yards and the puffing and snorting of engines ; where the very time of day is regulated, not by clocks, but by bells and whistles ; and where it is customary to speak of the hour " blowing " instead of "striking," work has attained its nadir of ignominy. What heartrending cases one comes in contact with, day by day ! What tremendous sacrifice of life ! Men and women are being crushed and crippled ; fair ^ young WORK AND WAGE 185 lives are drooping to the grave. The strongest, the bravest fall and perish. For what ? In spite of the prevailing cant anent the business use of luxuries, the only answer is, " To fill the already overflowing pockets of the wealthy, and to increase abundantly their super- abundance." Altogether amazing is it that the worker should be so content under these " whips and scorns." It is not because he is unaware of the larger life lying beyond him. He knows of, although he does not share, the fuller measure of existence enjoyed by his rich neigh- bour. The excessive caution bred in him by his stinted education is the sole reason for his brute-like endurance. When he is better educated, he will revolt ; for he will then not only be aware of that outlying life, but bethink himself of a method of taking part in it. At present he dare not act ; he dare not express himself but in vague mutterings ; he dare not even think. When thought obtrudes itself, he drowns it in drink or gambling. He is not in a condition of natural sleep ; he is under the influence of drugs of his own administering. But the time is coming when the better education he is gradually getting, as a boy at the day-school, as a youth at the night-school, as a man in the lecture-hall, will force him to think, in spite of beer and horses ; and in that day he will snap the toils that bind him as they were tow, and enter, like the king he is, into his inheritance. CHAPTER VIII THE PROBLEM OF THE ROOF-TREE " THE Englishman's home is his castle." Within the walls of that domestic stronghold he dwells in safety and peace. When he speaks of home, he means the place of all places, the charmed retreat whither he may fly from the stress and strain of the world, where he may safely commit his chiefest treasures. There is a fragrance about the very word suggestive of the confi- dence and joy, the sanctity and solemnity of that family life which was ordained from the beginning, and upon which our national greatness is founded as upon a rock. So much, and more, does home mean to thousands on thousands of happy English people. Very good. That is as it should be. But what does it mean to that million of Londoners who want decently housing, especially to those 400,000 whose family life is spent in the narrowness and stuffi- ness of single rooms ? My friend Bonn is a respectable working-man. He rents a four-roomed house. The first room is occupied by a married man, his wife and four children ; the second, by a bachelor ; the third and fourth, by Bonn, wife and four children. Thirteen persons in all occupy the four poky little rooms. In THE PROBLEM OF THE ROOF-TREE 187 one of the riverside streets of this district there was a house of four small rooms which harboured (I use the word advisedly) no less than nineteen persons. In the year 1901 and in the present year, for aught I know a six-roomed house in this neighbourhood " accommo- dated " thirty grown people. From the housing point of view, St. Cuthbert's Lodge has had a romantic history. The proud possessor of eight little rooms, it has been in turn a school, a beer-shop, and an asylum for gipsies. Forty years ago, I am told, it housed eight different families, one for each room ; and within the last ten years it could boast a resident population of seven adults and twenty-seven children. In this East End we turn our work-benches into beds, because we have no room for the genuine article ; we huddle together at night men and women, boys and girls in defiance of the laws of health and decency. Think of a mother, a father, and three children living between four walls ten feet apart, yet finding space for a lodger at night ! Think of a room doing double duty, occupied at night by day- workers and in the day by night- workers ! Think of a room with five beds in it, giving sleeping accommodation to seventeen persons ! Does the reader want something even more startling ? Well, an authentic case is on record in which three men and a woman were obliged, for lack of accommodation, to sleep in one bed ! But why multiply instances? Overcrowding is an acknowledged cancer on the body social. In some parts of London 20 per cent., in others 25 per cent., of the population are living under conditions which, from the point of view of the scientist no less than that of the moralist, are entirely condemnable. The result of this 1 88 SEVEN YEARS 1 HARD deplorable state of affairs is loss of time, loss of health, loss of life, loss of moral tone. The loss of time is calculable, namely, about twenty days a year, sometimes less, sometimes more. Less or more, however, it is a large slice out of a man's working days. Whence this loss? Well, there are vast armies of toilers in the East End who are obliged to travel to the four points of the compass every day in order to secure the merest needful accommodation. One would suppose that, after a long day's work, home, with its bright fire and steaming kettle, would be the very least that these people could claim. But it is not their good fortune to get their reward until hours after they have earned it. Who shall estimate the loss of health and life ? Much of the typhoid and consumption so prevalent among us, not to mention the thousand minor ills which flesh is heir to, is directly traceable to overcrowding. Death has a busy time of it in closely-packed and insanitary dwellings. Where the overcrowding is normal, he claims nineteen per thousand ; where it rises to 23 per cent, he claims twenty -three ; where it rises to 30, he claims twenty-four. And what shall we say of the most serious loss of all, namely, loss of character ? Worse than death itself is the degraded life. We shall get no high thinking from men whose crippled existences prevent any thinking, nor the subordination of the lower passions from those whose cramped environment renders noble passions in- conceivable. To such unhappy people what a mockery must be our glib talk about the joy and sanctity of home ! And the cause of overcrowding ? Let us dispose at once of the theory of natural depravity. It is true that the THE PROBLEM OF THE ROOF-TREE 189 East-ender has not any adequate realisation of the value of cleanliness. He is no lover of fresh air, for instance. I have managed to survive in Millwall by having the windows of my house open night and day, summer and winter. But the windows of the average East-ender are hermetically sealed, lest some stray breath of pure air should chance into his stifling rooms. The factory chimney belches forth destruction ; and in that hot breath of Dives the grass withereth, the flower fadeth, and the loved life slips away into the shadows. But no murmur escapes the East-ender. Smoke, in his view, is inevitable, part of the unalterable course of nature ; and he would as soon think of opposing it as he would think of opposing a thunderstorm. He rarely gets even his own chimney swept the profession of sweep is almost unknown in this neighbourhood. When the clogged soot becomes insufferable, he blows it out with a pennyworth of gunpowder. Well do I remember, when we took over St. Cuthbert's Lodge, what a battle we had with the foe of filth, although, in order to overcome it, we adopted every device known to the most up-to-date sanitation. There were living crea- tures in this house to which we could give no name, vermin as rare as they were loathsome to anyone of ordinarily cleanly habits. Especially difficult was the extermination of those insects which, more than others, symbolise the lowest depth of human foulness ; and I recall, not without a shudder, how irresistible our club lads found the temptation to break the monotony of " reading " by slapping their bare palms on the things as they moved sluggishly up and down the walls. As a matter of history, I have frequently seen the creatures referred to crawling over travellers in the local 'bus ; and 1 90 SEVEN YEARS* HARD it is a common experience for us to bring from our entertainments parasitic specimens, doubtless of the deepest interest to the entomologist, but merely irritating to the average layman. We will admit, then, that, in the view of many East- enders, cleanliness is not next to godliness ; or perhaps we ought to say that, in his view, it is equal to godliness in its unpopularity. But what does such an admission signify ? Not that the East-ender desires dirt any more than he desires ungodliness, but that circum- stances make it difficult for him to be clean, even as they make it difficult for him to be godly. His environ- ment is too strong for him. We have no right to be surprised at his degradation. Our surprise should be reserved for the occasions on which we find him, as happily we often do, a decent and God-fearing citizen. With all our superior advantages, there is no reason whatever to believe that we should be one whit better than he, were we under compulsion to change places with him. Some East-enders doubtless might be cleaner than they are ; but so might some West-enders. If it be true, as indeed it is, that many a poor woman has turned a decent house into a pigsty, it is equally true that the only reason why many a rich woman has not done the same is because she has been able to pay others to clean up her mess after her. And, while I am on this subject, I should like to add that one of the most curious fallacies respecting the East End is that, there, people are not rightly people at all, but only " masses." East-enders are no more "masses" than West-enders. They are simply indi- viduals congregated together for mutual benefit. And not to lay stress on the aristocracy which every East- THE PROBLEM OF THE ROOF-TREE 191 ender can claim as a direct descendant of our common parents the East End abounds in gentlefolk. To cite a few of the cases which have come under my personal observation : Gilbert's father is a physician of some distinction ; Mrs. Millishaw's grandfather was an admiral ; an uncle of Murrens' is an officer in the Army ; Topsy's uncle is a highly-placed official in India ; while the Spottmans are nearly related to an earl. Natural depravity, indeed ! Why, if the East-ender were to follow the example of some of his " betters," he would speedily find himself in the gutter. The marvel is that, in spite of the abominably unfair conditions under which he is compelled to live, he does manage to keep himself tolerably decent. " Abominably unfair conditions," I say ; and I mean it. He is heavily handi- capped all round. To live cheaply one must be rich. He, being poor, pays on the higher scale for everything heating, lighting, food, sanitation, housing, poor-rate ; and everything he pays for so liberally is inferior in quality. Nothing is first-class but the price. He buys his coal by the hundredweight, his gas by the penny- worth ; he rents his house by the week ; and for these " privileges " he is heavily taxed. It is the same with food. As I write, a street vendor is calling out milk at a penny a pint. I know it is not milk ; but Adelina, who has just invested in the stuff, does not know. It would be cheaper for Adelina, in the long run, if she paid sixpence a quart for real milk ; but she supposes, good, easy soul, that the counterfeit will " do for baby " ! It will " do " for baby, I have no doubt. Svengali is a purveyor of ice-cream ice-cream, you observe. He is largely patronised by little children, 1 92 SEVEN YEARS' HARD who, on hot days, cluster round his barrow by the score, eagerly exchanging their halfpennies for dollops of the half-frozen filth. He is not a clean man, Svengali. The other day he sold a little girl an " ice-cream " which contained four vermin. So with housing. Despite the ruinous rental the working-man stands at, his " home " is often not fit for human habitation. Prendergast showed me his room last week. What a sight it was ! The wall-paper was hanging in clammy strips ; one-third of the ceiling had collapsed. Paper, paint, or whitewash had not been used on that room for twelve years ! In many parts of the East End it is a common experience for the rain to come through the roof and dribble through the ceiling of living- room or bedroom. I had six years of that kind of thing. Many a night I have been awakened by the drip, drip of the rain on the counterpane. And I have been called late at night to a dying child, to find the water literally pouring on to the bed on which she was lying. And, then, see how the East-ender is mulcted where, of all places, he would naturally expect to be treated with justice, not to say magnanimity I mean, on his hardly-earned wages. The toiling Millwall docker pays a poor-rate of two-and-fourpence in the pound ; the gentlemanly loafer of Belgravia but two- pence. That is to say, the docker pays fourteen times as much as the "gentleman." This anomaly is due, I suppose, to the comfortable doctrine that whatever is, is right. But surely it cannot be right for the rich to leave the poor to succour each other in their old age, especially in consideration of the acknowledged fact that the rich man is the chief beneficiary of the poor man's labour. THE PROBLEM OF THE ROOF-TREE 193 Natural depravity ! I, for one, decline to believe that the poor are, in any way, more depraved than the rich ; but I solemnly assert that they have less chance of fighting against their depravity. The cause of over- crowding must be sought elsewhere. It will be found in high rents. The East End working- man pays for house-room a sum out of all proportion to his income. From a quarter to a third of his weekly wage goes to his " landlord." Try to realise what that means. Say your income is 400 a year. You would only be in the position of vast numbers of your fellow- citizens if for the most inadequate accommodation you were obliged to pay not less than 100, and possibly as much as ^130 a year. This you could do only by sub- letting. And that is precisely what the working-man does. Bonn, to whom I referred a few pages back, ought to be occupying the whole of his little house him- self. Why is he not doing so ? Because his earnings are only twenty-four shillings a week, and it is impossible for him to take eight shillings of this for rent, and live. Here are the actual expenses for one week of Cligall, who has a wife and four children : Meat, ^s. ; bread, 3^. , grocery, 5^. ; coal, is. 6d. ; vegetables, I s. 6d. ; oil, 6d. ; furniture, is. 6d. ; draper, 6d. ; beer, is. ; wife (pocket), is. 6d. ; husband (pocket), is. ; rent> gs. Obviously something is wrong in a poor man's manage in which the rent equals the cost of bread, grocery and coal combined. Cligall is evidently living beyond his means. He will have to eat less bread or pay less rent. He cannot eat less bread without starving, so he must pay less rent. He may do so by refusing the young man with the pencil behind his ear who will call on Monday. For that great refusal he will be turned out. O 194 SEVEN YEARS' HARD So that won't do. He is therefore reduced to two courses of action : he must pay less rent either by sub- letting or by moving into a smaller house. These are the only ways of escape from his predicament ; and whichever way he takes, he will certainly be overcrowded, and he and his family will suffer. He would gladly retain his house, which is in a respectable neighbourhood ; but he cannot afford to do so. And be it observed that a premium is actually placed on his degradation ; for, if he loves dirt, and is content to dwell in slums, he will be taxed far less than if he elects to live in cleanliness and decency. He would naturally prefer to continue occupying a house all to himself; but his slender re- sources would break under the strain. The object of his landlord is to wring from him the highest possible rent for the poorest possible accommodation ; and his own object is to use the available accommodation to its utmost possible limit. Thus room, house, street, neigh- bourhood, become overcrowded ; and dirt, disease, and death have their fell way. High rents are the direct cause of overcrowding. And why are rents high? Obviously, because the demand for houses is greater than the supply. If we could build houses in sufficient numbers, rents would find their level, and everybody would be housed comfortably and cheaply. It is because the population is so greatly in excess of available house-room, that the landlord can ask and obtain exorbitant rents. London's millions are increasing by leaps and bounds, while London's house- building is comparatively at a standstill. If the work- ing-man's rent is to cease to be an intolerable burden, the number of houses must be enormously increased. What efforts are being made in this direction ? Very THE PROBLEM OF THE ROOF-TREE 195 few, and those few almost wholly on wrong lines. Here a public body, there a private individual, are mildly exert- ing themselves to meet the demand ; but no adequate at- tempt to house the bulk of London's poor has ever yet been made. Take the London County Council. So far from lessening the housing difficulty, they have actually increased it. To the ingenuous minds of these gentle- men the problem seemed a very simple one. They looked at the slum areas with pitying eyes, and their hearts warmed to the unhappy dwellers therein. " Let us pull down their rookeries and build them decent homes," they murmured. They cleared the slum people out ; they razed the slum dwellings to the ground ; they erected in the place of them beautiful, beautiful houses. Then, beaming with benevolence, they said to the evicted ones, " See what good kind men we are ! Perhaps you thought us harsh when we turned you out ; but we were only acting for your benefit. Now come back and live in comfort and joy ! " But the evicted ones, who had meanwhile made slums for themselves elsewhere, shook their heads, saying, " No, thank you ! Your houses are high, and so are your rents. We prefer to stay where we are all low together. Slummy, dear benevolent L.C.C., but cheap!" And so the beautiful, beautiful houses are occupied by clerks, doctors, architects, and clergymen ; the slum has become a highly respectable neighbourhood ; and rents have gone up all round. So wise ! Nor has private philanthropy, hysterical and watery- eyed, done any better. It has suffered to an incredible degree from short-sightedness, or, rather, from being unable to see more than one thing at a time ; where- fore, its efforts have frequently resulted in incredible O 2 196 SEVEN YEARS' HARD absurdity. For instance, in a certain congested district of London, within a period of four years, there were admitted into Poor Law institutions 3,000 persons, of whom only 7 per cent, or 210, belonged to that par- ticular district. How was that ? Because the Church Army and the Salvation Army were attracting potential paupers from all quarters, whose indigence they were so far from curing that they were actually accentuating it by providing accommodation which, in its very nature, could not be other than temporary. These well-meaning people were good enough (or bad enough) to invite all and sundry to come and have a roof over their heads for threepence, twopence, or a penny a night ; and all the ruffians within hail crowded gleefully into the shelters provided for them, and found themselves worse off at the end of the week than they had been at the beginning. We English are both generous and grasping, and we never seem to know which role to assume. With our right hands we diligently undo what we succeed in doing with our left. In the character of philanthropists we honestly try to house the working-classes ; in the character of business men we honestly try to unhouse them. The house-jobber is frequently a philanthropist of the most definite shade, liberal, open-handed, ready with a contribution to any deserving charity. Yet he makes enormous capital out of his hapless fellow- citizens. His method is to buy up a slum district, make the smallest possible number of needful repairs, and re- let at a shameless profit. Needless to say, in a year or two the district is slummier than ever ; but the house- jobber has made his pile, and is living in Chester Square. THE PROBLEM OF THE ROOF-TREE 197 Or take the landowner. Who more benevolent than he ? Who more ready to give liberally on behalf of the " poor " from whom he is draining blood-money every day? When his conscience is aroused, as it occasion- ally is in the depth of winter, he lulls it to sleep again with the potion of a cheque, for which he receives the ecstatic thanks of the clergyman who is " doing such a splendid work in the East End, my dear ! " Or the employer of labour. Does he not provide reading-rooms for his workers, and oleographs, and moral lessons? Yet he has heartlessly destroyed hundreds of thousands of homes without making any sort of provision for the homeless. Previous to the Bill for Amending the Housing Act, 1903, Londoners were frequently sufferers from evictions of this kind. A wealthy manufacturer wished to extend his factory. He could do so only by dislodging those whose sole offence was that they were in his way. If possession be nine- tenths of the law, as it generally is supposed to be, the possessors had the strongest legal right to remain where they were. But, alas ! such a right, where it existed at all, was merely nominal. The manufacturer had wealth on his side ; and, unhappily, even the " right " of posses- sion is powerless against the " might " of wealth. So the manufacturer bought up the property, evicted the tenants, and extended his factory. With what contempt did Saltlake receive my sugges- tion that it was his duty to house the workers rendered homeless by his building scheme ! " Business is business," said he. " Business seems to be roguery," said I. " Business is business" he repeated. " Business should be Christianity," I retorted. 198 SEVEN YEARS' HARD Then there was our good friend Cammenbare, who contrived the wholesale destruction of a number of houses adjoining his property. Notice was served upon the tenants, some of whom found homes elsewhere ; but others were at their wits' ends where to go. They had tramped the neighbourhood for miles without success. Either there were no houses to be had, or those that were available were offered at a prohibitive rent. Meanwhile the work of annihilation was steadily proceeding. The backyards of the condemned houses had been demolished, together with all sanitary conveniences ; and the tenants had perforce turned the road into a kind of cesspool. The women were hysterical ; the men, dogged and silent. They were more like a flock of worried sheep than a company of human beings. After I had heard their pitiful story from beginning to end, I promised to do what I could. And I did it. Needless to explain how. It was something to get these poor folk a few days' grace ; it was much more to be able to educate public opinion on the matter. Clearly, a manufacturer who, for private gain, renders a number of innocent people homeless should be legally compelled, although he may not feel himself morally bound, to re-house them. Before the passing of the Act, respectable people, because they were poor, were liable, at a few days' notice, to be driven from homes endeared to them by long association. No accommodation was made for them in the neighbourhood of their work ; and they were forced to herd together wherever they could, like cattle in a pen. On the completion of the new building, a fresh swarm of humanity invaded the already overcrowded district, and rents leaped up to famine prices. Before Saltlake came to the East End you could THE PROBLEM OF THE ROOF-TREE 199 get a four-roomed house for six-and-sixpence a week ; after he came, ten-and-sixpence was asked for the same accommodation. One fervently hopes that the provisions of the new Housing Bill will be loyally ob- served, and that it will not meet the fate of many similar measures by being honoured more in the breach than in the observance. Overcrowding, then, is due to high rents ; and rents are high because the demand for houses is in excess of the supply. To satisfy the demand, under existing con- ditions, seems hopeless. Can we reduce it ? There are those who think that we can ; and they suggest that we may stop the rush to London by artificially creating centres of activity elsewhere. They draw a picture of a rural population, busy and intelligent, who are contented to pass their days " far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife." The idea is pretty enough, but it is only an idea ; it cannot be reproduced in real life. A hun- dred years ago, men lived in villages ; to-day they live in cities. We may deprecate the fact ; we cannot alter it. Its source lies in the deep places of our being. In order that we may enjoy the society of our fellows, we are willing to forego nature's most precious gifts prosperity, peace, a painless old age. These, although indeed great blessings, we rightly consider worthless when compared with the doing and daring of a life lived cheek by jowl, shoulder to shoulder, with humanity in its millions. It is true that the tide of life, as it flows citywards, bears with it much that is useless and vicious ; but this is the stern price we must pay for a great privilege. We brave the company of the lowest in order that we may enjoy the company of the highest. Nor is this tendency merely sentimental. Our com- 200 SEVEN YEARS' HARD mercial prosperity depends upon our ability to compete with other countries. This we can only do if we yield to the demand for economical division of labour ; and division of labour is possible only where men congre- gate in large numbers. So out of the eater comes forth meat, and outx>f the curse comes forth blessing. The people crowd into the cities, and in the crowded cities the continuance of our national greatness is assured. In spite of the schemes without number for the solution of the housing problem, the problem is still with us, a Sphinx's riddle of disheartening complexity. Where shall we look for a satisfactory answer ? Not to the making of slums by the clearing of slum areas. Not to the creation of overcrowding by the erection ot temporary shelters. Not to the bribing of the worker with our left hand, while we bleed him with our right. Not to the reduction of the number of would-be tenants. Municipal experiments are hopeless. Philanthropical experiments are hopeless. The on-rushing multitude has nowhere to lay its million heads, and we grow hysterical at the sight. " Where shall we look for our salvation ? " we cry. And the only answer is, " To the land." "Ah, yes! to the land!" we say. "Of course! What more simple ? Let us buy land where it is nice and cheap. There, in the near country, lies any quantity of it. We will buy square miles of it, we will ; and we'll run trams and trains to it, we will ; and our poor dear working people shall be housed at last ! " What a pity it is that such a charming scheme should be so useless ! And why useless ? Because cheap land is dear land the moment anybody wants it ; only land that nobody wants is cheap. The effect of purchasing THE PROBLEM OF THE ROOF-TREE 201 land for building purposes on the outskirts of our cities would be to raise the value, not only of all the land in the neighbourhood of the purchase, but also of all the land in the neighbourhood of the trains and trams running to it. So the last state of us would be worse than the first. Not thus will the land solve the housing problem. We must go down to the very origin of things, and ask, "Whose is the land? How should it be used?" And I believe the answers to those two questions will be found to be : First, the land is the property of the whole nation, and not that of individuals, many or few ; and, secondly, the land must be used for the benefit of the whole nation, and not for that of individuals, many or few. There are certain things, such as air and light, which, because they are essential to life, belong to mankind by natural right, and are at the disposal of all who live. No one is allowed to appropriate them and lease them for gain. So, one day, it ought to be so, one day, it shall be with land. Land, being essential to life, should be at the disposal, under proper regulation, of all who live ; and it ought to be just as impossible to sell land as it is, happily, impossible to sell air and light. But it is not impossible to sell land, as we know too well ; and the unholy traffic goes on apace, the law aiding and abetting. So long as the law remains as it is, so long will the philanthropist be deterred from building houses for the poor, and so long will the speculating landowner find it to his advantage to delay building until it suits his purpose. The true solution of the housing problem, as of all human problems whatsoever, is to put to use, to the highest possible use, everything that we possess. 202 SEVEN YEARS' HARD We shall escape so long as we use to the best of our ability, even though that best be imperfect ; but how shall we escape if we neglect ? " But surely," interrupts the reader, " there is nothing to neglect ; every available square foot of land, at least in the London area, either is already covered with houses, or is in process of being covered." Not so. There are, at this moment, thousands of acres lying idle. Why is this land not built upon ? The answer is, that it is too dear. Think of that. The rich man holds these precious acres, which would bring health and comfort to those thousand-thousand Londoners who need to be decently housed. To the cry of the thousand-thousand the rich man turns a deaf ear. Like the dog in the manger, he cannot enjoy the land himself, and he will not let anyone else enjoy it. The law gives him every encouragement to behave in this unseemly fashion, recognising two kinds of land : that which is built upon, and that which is not built upon. Land which is built upon is assessed at its building value, which is from 40 to 50 per acre ; land which is not built upon is assessed at its agricultural value, namely, .3 to $ per acre. It is therefore to the interest of the owner, other things being equal, to let the land alone until its price rises. The longer he holds it, the more valuable it becomes ; and its value is enhanced, not because he does anything to make it so, but because the workers in its neighbourhood do every- thing to make it so. He is sure to reap in due season ; and he will reap, not according to his own sowing, but according to that of other people. If his price is not accepted to-day, it will be accepted to- morrow, or next month, or a year hence, or ten years THE PROBLEM OF THE ROOF-TREE 203 hence. He can afford to wait until that day when, in answer to the cry of the worker for a roof over his head, the required price will be forthcoming. In a terribly literal sense, other men have laboured, and he has entered into their labours ; and he actually withholds the land from the people who have made it valuable, and because they have made it valuable. The law must be altered. In what direction? In the direction of limiting the individual's and increasing the State's power over the land. This limitation on the one hand, and increase on the other, must go on until the eighty million acres of land in Great Britain belong to the forty million dwellers on that land. This, the nationalisation of the land, should be the objective of every true reformer ; and, however much it may be delayed, it should never be lost sight of. One need not be a prophet to foretell that this great reform will come as surely as to-morrow's sun will rise. But it may be a long time in coming. Meanwhile, what practical effort can be made in the direction of limiting the individual's power over the land, and so releasing it for the use of the community? The answer is simplicity itself: the cause of overcrowding being the rating of unoccupied land at its agricultural and not at its building value, the cure of overcrowding will be found in rating unoccupied land at its building and not at its agricultural value. The State must insist that the landlord bear his share of the taxation. At present he escapes with the merest travesty of taxation, no matter how his land has increased in value without any effort on his part ; while the workers, whose diligence has raised the price of his land, have to bear an intolerable burden. To leave unoccupied land practically untaxed, as the law permits 204 SEVEN YEARS' HARD it to be at present, is to endow with a great privilege the already privileged, and to saddle with a heavy burden the already overburdened. Since money must come from somewhere, obviously if it does not come from the rich, it must come from the poor ; so that the poor are not only the effective instruments of the in- creased value of land, but are taxed because they are. Economically it would have been better for them had they not been industrious, but had left the land in its primitive condition. For example, thirty years ago, a wealthy speculator named Alick Shinder bought a piece of land in the East End for which he paid 200 an acre. This land is now in the midst of a working population, whose industry has raised its value to 700 an acre. For the sake of argument we will suppose that Shinder may lawfully claim the 500 increment ; although, as a matter of fact, the sum represents not his work but that of other people. Let him have his 700 per acre, how- ever ; but let the State, as a matter of simple justice, rate him on the basis of 700 per acre, and not, as at present, on the basis of 200. That is all that is asked ; and, simple though it appears, it would be sufficient to change the whole of the working-man's outlook. At present he is incredibly hampered, and not least by his self-styled friends. These well-meaning persons make great efforts to get the working-man's wages raised, and allow the increment to drop into the landlord's pocket. They are eloquent in their advocacy of free trade, and leave the source of all trade, the land, under the thumb of the speculator. Meanwhile, their protege is attempting the impossible. He gallantly runs the race that is set before him ; but the faster he runs, THE PROBLEM OF THE ROOF-TREE 205 the heavier he is handicapped. He works with a will, remembering the rest that follows labour ; but the harder he works, the less chance has he of rest. He scrapes and saves for the days of weakness that are coming ; but the more he earns, the more he is mulcted of his earnings. If we would raise the working-man, we must house him ; and we shall never succeed in housing him until we have given the authorities power to say to the landlord " Your land is wanted by the community. You may do two things with it, but not a third. You may build on it ; you may let us build on it ; but you shall not leave it alone" CHAPTER IX SOUP-TICKET PHILANTHROPY DISTRICT visiting is not what it used to be. The amiable and incapable young person, who fluttered from door to door with a basket of material food in one hand and a bundle of spiritual food in the other, is gone for ever. Her place has been taken by the "worker." That name has its disadvantages. Young Darwin waylaid me one Monday, smiling all over his body. " I've told Jim about your Workers' Meeting," he said. " Who is Jim ? " I asked. " My big brother. 'E's a worker, if you like." " Where does he work ? " " Millwall Dock. Earns twenty-four bob a week, Jim does." " But, my dear boy," I murmured faintly, remembering my wife and the drawing-room carpet, " the meeting is for parish helpers district visitors, Sunday School teachers, and so on." Young Darwin regarded me with ill-concealed con- tempt : " Parish 'elpers ? Wy, you said it was for workers? SOUP-TICKET PHILANTHROPY 207 But there are other objections to the modern " worker " much more serious than her name. She is extremely up-to-date ; she is very conscientious ; she is careful to the point of cunning; she is diplomatic to the point of duplicity ; yet she is not a success. She lacks love. Tact can do much ; love can do all. To say the exact thing at the exact moment ; to smile when irri- tated ; to speak sweetly when angry ; to whittle down strong condemnation into faint praise : so much tact can accomplish, and does. But it is a terribly dangerous weapon for the use of any but the wisest. In the East End it has wrought an inconceivable amount of mischief, destroying the possibility of free intercourse, clouding with suspicion the most hopeful enterprises, casting up walls of cold granite between souls which should have enjoyed happy communion, and teaching the poor to cover their raging wrath with a wretched assumption of meekness. What the East End wants is love ; what the East End is ready to give, in return, is love. People upon whom argument, moral suasion, even bribery, are abso- lutely lost, who are totally unimpressed by cautious cleverness or studied openness, are amenable to this mysterious force. Love is the reward of those who never forget the sufferings of the poor although they may forget their sins, and who never allow tact to blunt the edge of their sympathy, or cowardice their sense of justice. To inspire reverence in the irreverent, tender- ness in the hardened, enthusiasm in the indifferent, trust in the faithless, love in the loveless, is the business of love, and of love alone. The up-to-date worker has somehow fallen flat. Her 208 SEVEN YEARS' HARD condescension is so condescending. She can never forget herself. She is everlastingly remembering what is due to her position. She is always very religious, yet she is not religious enough. She makes long prayers ; yet she would as little think of using the word " God " or " Christ " in her visits among the poor as she would of using that of " Zeus " or " Aphrodite." These are for the church, not for the home ; for the confessional, not for the front parlour. She will talk glibly of the value of thrift, of fresh air, of a sound education ; but the watchwords of religion, " salvation," " redemption," " fatherhood," those battle-cries of the soul which have plucked many a brand from the burning, are ignored by her. This may be due in part to constitutional shyness, to the fear of obtruding sacred things into trivial con- versation ; but I cannot help thinking that it arises almost wholly from the professional view the up-to-date worker takes of her work. She can organise a demon- stration, run a " treat " or a tea-meeting, sit for hours on boards, committees and sub-committees ; but she shrinks from admitting the canaille to a share of her loftiest emotions, and is devoutly thankful that in her Father's house are many mansions. Miss Granville's relations, as Mrs. Trotters once con- fidentially informed me, were " upper." One of her uncles, it seems, was a peer ; another, an M.P. Her cousin had been a Lord Mayor. She herself was a holy woman, much given to good works ; but her family was her weakness. Some one once addressed her as Miss Granvile, omitting an " 1," and thus innocently suggesting a connection with the well-known sausage- makers. The lady's saintly face was distorted with fury ; and she punished herself for her unseemly anger SOUP-TICKET PHILANTHROPY 209 by limiting herself to two crusts for her daily dinner duri ng the whole of Lent. Yet, in her pitifully narrow way, Miss Granville's ambition was to be loved by the poor. Try as she might, however, she could not win their affection. The reason was not far to seek : she felt herself to be among them, but not of them ; and they, for their part, were acutely conscious of the distinction. She could be charming to them because she supposed herself to be separated from them by an impassable social gulf; but to those whom she suspected of being on an equality with herself, or of claiming to be, she could be as cutting as the east wind. We gave a party, one evening, to the poorest of our folk it was, of course, long before we came to Millwall and Miss Granville was invited " to meet a few friends." Instantly all her family pride rose up in arms. The thought of the peer, the M.P., and the Lord Mayor was too much for her. She sent a polite but decided refusal. We spent a charming evening in our drawing- room, our dear people thoroughly enjoying themselves ; and when we broke up, we felt we had got nearer to each other than ever before. " So sorry you couldn't come yesterday," observed my wife, on meeting the great lady next day. " I was otherwise engaged," was the stiff reply. " A pity ! I wanted to introduce you. The poor dears had such a happy time. They looked so nice in their best bibs and tuckers." Miss Granville's pale face flushed crimson. There was a moment of utter bewilderment ; then, suddenly, she turned ashy pale, and, forgetful of all discretion, stam- mered P 210 SEVEN YEARS* HARD " I thought it was a party of your own friends." " So it was," said my wife. Miss Granville imagined that, in some mysterious fashion, her destiny was of a different kind from that of the people among whom she " worked." She had not learnt to identify herself, for weal or woe, with her poorer brothers and sisters. An inexhaustible belief in the possibilities of every human soul is of the very essence of Christianity. For the worker, all other qualities put together are of less importance. In every man, however low he may have sunk, there is an element of goodness, some remnant of that Divine Image after whose likeness he was fashioned, and into whose likeness he shall one day be restored. The worker can fall into no more fatal error than to suppose that the abandoned wretch, grovelling in the swine's trough of his passions, is capable of reformation only up to a certain point. Yet that is precisely the kind of mistake into which the worker is apt to fall. She regards it as her bounden duty to persuade the " masses " to accept the clubs, drills, and dances pro- vided for them, these being the recognised means of " getting hold " of them. So far she is right. To expel the devil of mischief by creating harmless interests, to drive dull care away by uproarious gaiety, is good as far as it goes. But it does not go far enough. I was lamenting to another worker of the Granville type the difficulty of getting the lowest classes in touch with religion. " I wish we could somehow induce them to come to church," I said, " and so lead them up gradually to Confirmation and Communion." Church ! Confirmation ! ! Communion ! ! ! gasped SOUP-TICKET PHILANTHROPY 211 the worker. " Oh dear, no ! I don't agree with you at all. They are totally unfit for such things." She lacked imagination, you see ; and people who lack imagination should not be trusted to work among the poor. Yet they abound. I remember there was a man on one of the East End committees on which I used to serve, who was of a light-hearted disposition, and would occasionally venture a remark of an unbusiness- like character. Curious it was to observe the freezing expression on the women's faces. To laugh would have been unprofessional, so laughter was barred, and in its place appeared a fearful expression of aloofness, or an icily forbidding smile, such as one would humour a lunatic with. Now a joke, the rougher the better, appeals to the East-ender when more solid reasoning ignominiously fails. Therefore, it is important that the philanthropist should season his example, no less than his precept, with wit Under the most favourable circumstances he will succeed in realising but a small proportion of his dreams for the betterment of the people ; without a plentiful supply of Attic salt he will assuredly fail altogether. When the worker has a tongue, her sphere of mischief is enormous ; when, in addition, her conscience is placed in the keeping of her confessor, it is practically unlimited ; and when to these qualifications she adds incurable ignorance, and there- fore indomitable vanity, she is like to strike the stars. At present the only qualification an East End worker need possess is inability to be anything else. This is wrong. Since the East-ender is undeveloped, it is of the utmost importance to allow none but the highly developed to have dealings with him. To permit any- P 2 212 SEVEN YEARS' HARD one, irrespective of character, education, or ability, to " work among the poor," which in plain English means to work disaster, is in the highest degree criminal. Incompetence in every other department of life is no longer the only certificate required of the schoolmaster ; and even doctors must now know something of the art of healing. Yet, so far are we from realising the pro- found importance of the work of raising the " masses," that we cheerfully commit this all but impossible task to quite impossible people ; and the ranks of the " workers " are filled to overflowing with an inglorious company ot meddlers and muddlers. A word on the Women's Settlement. No man has more cause than I to be grateful to individual Settlement workers. I shall never forget the unaffected generosity of Miss Hilda Barry (now Mrs. Reginald Fremantle), herself a pioneer on Settlement lines. Yet few men, I imagine, have less belief in the Settle- ment ideal. May I be permitted, without prejudice, to enumerate, as they occur to me, my main objections. To begin with, it is a capital error to house a Settlement in a huge building. Small dwellings, more nearly corresponding to those of the poor, would be infinitely more appropriate. Better still would it be for ladies to board and lodge together in couples. It is true that the largeness and system of a Settlement are in touch Hrith this age of bigness and organisation ; it is also true that such a place appears to strike at individualism in a very real fashion ; but it is equally true that a big Settlement unnecessarily punctuates the division between rich and poor, and is worse, if anything, than a big vicarage. Then, as to the claim of independence. The position SOUP-TICKET PHILANTHROPY 213 in which the Settlement places well-meaning women is little short of ludicrous. Coming, for the most part, from villages where the parochial system is everything, they are obliged to learn that, from the Settlement point of view, the parochial system is nothing. Should they go to their parish church, they like it to be distinctly understood that they do so, not as parishioners, but as independent workers ; and, in order to emphasise this attitude of theirs, they as often as not dispense their patronage elsewhere. Indeed, they are told off for duty in the various parishes, much as soldiers might be ; and they are as rigid in obedience to their superior as they are detached in their relation to their parish clergy. Once upon a time and I mention the incident merely to illustrate my point, and in no spirit of resentment a Settlement lady brought me a candidate for confirmation. I enrolled the girl a member of my class, put her through a thorough course of instruction, presented her to the Bishop, got her confirmed, and was rewarded by seeing her dragged off to another parish to make her first Com- munion ! A straw will show which way the stream flows. The Women's Settlement aims at being independent, and succeeds in being objectionable. Its residents imagine themselves free lances, and insist on their house being regarded as private. Neither contention is admis- sible. No churchwoman can possibly be a free lance so long as the parish exists ; and no Settlement, which in its very nature is a public house, can claim the privileges of a private one. For all I know, the parish ideal may turn out to be wrong, and the Settlement ideal right ; but I am quite convinced that both cannot be right, and that the Tightness of the one involves the wrongness of the other. The Settlement ideal is as opposed to the 2i 4 SEVEN YEARS' HARD parochial ideal as minus to plus ; and, therefore, as long as the parochial ideal is concretely represented in our midst, I conceive it to be my duty to support it and not its opposite. Nor is there, so far as I can see, any pos- sibility of real union. The Settlement cannot be grafted on to the parish unless it shares the life of the parish ; and it cannot share the life of the parish in any true sense, because it is independent. Things so antagonistic may be dovetailed, but not grafted. The Settlement is virtually a parish in itself, its head being the parish priestess. It owes no allegiance beyond its four walls. It is an up-to-date nunnery, and will probably share the fate of the mediaeval monasteries. Its continued exist- ence is impossible in any parish where Churchmen are loyal to their head ; where, for any reason, they are other- wise, it will live ; but its life will ultimately be the death of the parish. There is no reason, however, why the Settlement theory should not be applied beneficently in practice. Let men and women, boys and girls, who feel the call, come to live in the East End, in comfort but not in luxury, in families and not in celibacy ; let them come swept clean of mouldy traditions respecting the " classes " and the " masses " ; let them come imbued through and through with the sense of humanity's claim on humanity ; let them come to learn rather than to teach ; let them come to live the common life in an un- common manner ; and the redemption of the East End will prove no impossible dream. The Church parson to say nothing of Nonconformist ministers of many denominations is ready for them, ready to use them in every conceivable way. He is no longer merely a gentleman ; he is priest and pastor, although remnants of the old " gentlemanly " tradition SOUP-TICKET PHILANTHROPY 215 still linger. Mrs. Shopan, who occasionally comes to me for counsel and comfort, never allows me to forget that fact, for she invariably excuses herself for " troubling me " in these identical terms : " I come to you, Mr. Free, as a Catholic goes to his priest." Poor soul ! Little does she guess how that pitiful apology stabs. It is a terrible in- dictment of our much-vaunted Protestantism, when you think of it, sweeping us back to the dark ages of the eighteenth century. But most things have changed in a hundred years, and with them, as I say, the parson. In the East End he is at his best. One has nothing but praise for his self-denying and devoted work. The way in which he maintains a cheerful exterior amid all the distressing and depressing conditions of his labour is beyond all praise. His life is terribly exacting ; his difficulties are, in very deed, well-nigh overwhelming. Is it surprising that the flesh in him sometimes rebels ? From time to time, terrible stories reach us of indolence, drunkenness, and still worse failings on the part of some East End clergymen. What is the remedy for this state of things ? The answer is, Shorter incumbencies. Priests of piety and ability are left in the East End for twenty, thirty, even for forty years. A man is not a machine. In spite of nay, in consequence of the stern discipline of his life, the East End parson has his bursts of uncontrollable longing. Let him clip the feathers of his fancy as he will, they are always growing again, and at inopportune moments are apt to snatch him from his sordid surroundings and plunge him into the vortex of the unknown. Little wonder if he returns from some of these involuntary excursions with his white wings soiled. The stupidity of leaving a man for the whole of his life 216 SEVEN YEARS' HARD in a parish where he has no one to chat to, no one to call on, no elevating influence of any kind to break the dull monotony of his life, is unpardonable ; and until those responsible make some move in the direction of a freer shuffling of livings, so that one section of men shall not have all the plums, while another has all the stones, we may expect to continue to be shocked by serious defec- tions from the very strait and narrow way of East End clerical life. Overwhelming, I say, is the slum parson's work. The statement may appear exaggerated to those who are ignorant of the conditions under which such work is done. Even people who ought to know better have the most limited views of the matter. Again and again I have been asked, with annoying naivete^ " But what do you do ? There are your sermons on Sundays, of course ; but the rest of the week you have to yourself, haven't you ? " To the East End parson who recognises his duty, every waking moment, and many moments that should be given to sleep, are devoted to the con- sideration of the best methods of fulfilling it. He must literally be all things to all men. In my own work, for instance and I quote it because I know more about it than about that of any other man it has been necessary for me to officiate at all Communions, baptisms, and churchings ; to preach and pray in the street as well as in the church ; to visit the sick and the whole ; to superintend the Sunday School ; to train a choir, drill a brigade, run a men's club, run a lads' club, run all sorts of excursions, address men and boys, address women, keep church accounts, play the piano, recite Sims, sing a comic song, eject disturbers of the peace, settle quarrels, accept the advice of friendly enemies, and keep the SOUP-TICKET PHILANTHROPY 217 financial pot boiling. And, lest the reader should still be sceptical, here are particulars of two of my working days. Few East End clergymen do less, I imagine, while many do a great deal more. I need scarcely add, perhaps, that the record is not imaginary : it is actual fact from beginning to end. First Day. 8.20 a.m., breakfast ; 9, investigate, as school manager, certain suggested improvements ; 9.30, examine, with inspector, houses in which draining is re- ported defective ; 10, morning prayer in church ; 10.30, call on sick woman; n to I, interviews; I p.m., luncheon ; 2, walk a mile and a half to Poplar ; 3 to 5, take chair at a committee meeting ; 5, walk home ; 6, evening prayer in church ; 7, dinner ; 7.45, churchings ; 8, baptisms ; 8.30, teachers' instruction ; 9, lay helpers' business meeting. Second Day. 8 a.m., morning prayer in church ; 8.30, breakfast; 10 to 11.30, interviews; 11.30, religious instruction in school; 12, interviews; i, luncheon; 2, visits ; 3.20, address mothers' meeting ; 4, interviews and visits ; 6, meeting with Sunday School superintendents ; 6.30, dinner ; 7.30, business meeting ; 8, visit dying man ; 8.30, lecture ; 9.30, interviews. Let the reader fill in the interstices of such days with the hundred-and-one duties, both public and private, inseparable from the parson's life callers who must be seen, letters that must be written, news that must be digested, courtesies that must be exchanged, knotty points that must be thought out : minor matters all, but matters, nevertheless, which will brook no delay and he will not go far wrong in concluding that the- East End parson's life is not a lazy one. Wonder is sometimes expressed that the parson col- lapses after ten or fifteen years' service. The reason is 2i 8 SEVEN YEARS' HARD not far to seek. He is for ever pouring forth the best that is in him, well aware that there is none to whom he can look to fill the drained cisterns of his soul. He is subjected to the severest censure if he leaves undone any of the multitudinous things he ought to have done, or ventures to do in any wise the things he ought not to have done. Worse than all, his best helpers are con- stantly migrating, he himself, with a topsy-turvydom suggestive of one of Mr. Gilbert's plays, being the un- willing instrument in the thinning of his congregation and the denuding of his parish ; for his humanity com- pels him to do his best to remove from the sorrows and temptations of the East End those whose natural faculties promise a happier career elsewhere. Earnest efforts, then, by workers lay and clerical, good, bad, and indifferent, are being made to reform the East End. With what success ? I suppose that the most optimistic of us will scarcely maintain that the efforts put forth are accomplishing what might legiti- mately be expected of them. That something is being done towards the removing of the obloquy of past neglect, no one will deny ; but that that something is of very great moment, I imagine few would insist. The most indifferent student of the East End cannot be without a suspicion of " something rotten in the state of Denmark." As a matter of fact, the efforts of philanthropy are out of all proportion to its results. In proof of our success, we point to our clubs for both sexes and all ages, to our Sunday Schools, to our social functions. But, before giving way to unlimited joy, there are certain questions which we are in duty bound to ask ourselves, such as, What becomes of our boys and girls when they pass into the world ? Do they hold SOUP-TICKET PHILANTHROPY 219 to, or do they desert, the Faith in which they have been reared ? What proportion of the members of our clubs are in living connection with religion ? How much of our parochial machinery is merely mechanical ? how much, material means to spiritual ends ? It ill becomes us to boast so much. The net result of our restless energy will be found in our empty churches and in almost universal indifference to religion. Let us be frank in the matter. We have failed, and ignominiously failed, to make the working people of the East End either God- fearing or God-loving. We have piped unto them, and they have not danced ; we have mourned unto them, and they have not lamented. It is not easy to determine at whose door to lay this gigantic failure. It seems pretty clear, however, that a large share of responsibility rests with the Church of England. Had she done her duty in the past, much of the prevailing indifference might have been prevented. But she repeated for the millionth time the story of the man in possession. Others had laboured, and she had entered into their labours ; and all was so safe and prosperous that she was tempted to sing her little death-song, " Soul, thou hast much goods laid up for many years ; take thine ease, eat, drink, and be merry." Too assured of the supremacy gained for her by the self-sacrifice of many generations, she grew presump- tuous, keeping careless watch over her household ; and by her laxity she drove the more zealous and less logical of her children from the security of her feeding- places to the liberty and danger of new pastures, and the less zealous and more logical to the wilderness where there were no pastures at all. To the negligence of the Church of England, and to 220 SEVEN YEARS' HARD the indifference on the one hand and the sectarianism on the other engendered by it, I attribute the chief blame for the East-ender's unhappy lot. Had the Church been true to her mission, she never would have allowed herself to be weakened by lazy acquiescence or violent disruption ; but, in order to offer a solid phalanx to the common enemy, she would have grappled to her with hooks of steel all elements of good of whatsoever kind. In her pride of purse and power she has refused to mother her own children, and now her struggle for the merest existence has changed the milk of her human kindness into the gall of bitterness. Indifference and sectarianism ! It is the indifference of the East-ender that makes him appear ungrateful. One of the commonest remarks of friends who interest themselves in our work is, " How very grateful the people must be to you ! " Must they ? Those who live in their midst could tell a different story. I knew a lady who toiled among a number of women for nine years. On her retirement these women made a collection, and bought her a two-and-sixpenny work-box ! That is to say, they valued her services at the rate of threepence farthing a year. Another worker had a still more curious experience. After several years of strenuous labour, he resigned ; and some of the men with whom he had been closely associated put their heads together and resolved to give him a present. To this end they decided on a subscrip- tion of three shillings. I was astonished and delighted. It was the most generous thing I had come across during my East End experience. I began to blame my- self for over-hasty judgment. But my ardour was to receive a cold douche. When I inquired what the SOUP-TICKET PHILANTHROPY 22 1 present was to be, I got this amazing answer "Well, you see, we've reckoned it up, and we can have a jolly day for three shillings a head, and Mr. Bliss shall go for nothing ! " But Mrs. Heel's notion of speeding the parting guest was still more original. A group of women were dis- cussing the approaching separation. " If he's got to go, he's got to go, and there's an end of it," said Mrs. Heel, philosophically ; " but wot I say is, that I've no- think wotever agin 'im, and if he 'as a trifle for me to remember 'im by, I ain't the woman to refuse it." Whence the indifference that betrays itself in such ingratitude ? Well, the philanthropical worker in, the East End is looked upon merely as a " dispenser of help," and, in the East-ender's vernacular, " help " means cash or its equivalent. One has no emotions of tenderness towards a money-bag ; and when the worker is regarded merely as a channel for the conveyance of " charity," he must not expect gratitude. I have been summoned to the bedside of many a sick person in Millwall ; but the number of occasions on which I have been summoned for the purpose of giving spiritual help could be counted on the ringers of one hand. The " help " desired has invariably been beef-tea and brandy. In face even of such facts as these, however, we must not be hasty in our judgment. The lot of our brothers and sisters is so hard, their outlook is so limited, the pressure of mere existence is so exacting, that they have no time to think of anything but food. And if we workers represent to them the comfort of the good things with which in the Magnificat we are told that God shall fill the hungry, we need not be unduly concerned, I think, that our preaching and our praying fall so flat. 222 SEVEN YEARS' HARD For, in spite of the ever-increasing number of people who seem anxious to discredit the poverty of the East End, the East End is poor with a poverty which possesses none of the fascinating glamour of the trans- pontine melodrama about it, but is brutally naked and repulsive ; a poverty of empty stomachs and gnawing pain, of mortal despair daily conquered by ever-living, ever-springing hope. Let the following epistles speak for themselves. They are all appeals for "help" of the kind we have been considering, and are reproduced word for word and letter for letter. The first is from Stella : " plea Sir i write to ask you if you could help me a little as Mr prince as been ill before Christmas but it not throue drink that i ask for Any think this time it illness he as had to go to the hospitale and he as got work when he is able to go to it and i have had to part with Every think to pay rent and get a bite for the children i write now becous i have not a bit a bread to give the Children Mr Prince as gon to try an do a little today Mrs. PRINCE." Here is one from a husband a great rarity ; but I gather that the wife was too ill to do the dirty work herself: " DEAR SIR, riting these few lines to you to let you know that Mr. Mountain could not start me yesterday because he his slack so he took my name and Adress Dear Sir I should be verry much Oblige iff you could give my wife one or two tickets for some food we have not got any food in the house I am verry Sorry that I can not come my self because I am cleaning up the place for my Wife. Good by." SOUP-TICKET PHILANTHROPY 223 Terror of the landlord bulks largely in these letters, as the following examples will show : " Mr. Free Mr Blinker as start this morning thank god but i had a Letter from the Land Lord to say if not the Weeks rent when Collector Call to day between 3 and 4 to prevent further proceedings but i cant give him Eny think till Saturday as Mr. Blinker wont get it till then it will be 2 Week on Monday due but what make him so sharp i is as soon as he Can get you out he does the place up and put 1/6 moor on than are 4/6 down now. pleas Mr. Free are they to Come down for The Soup Mrs. BLINKER." " pleas Mr Free i am sorry to have to ask you again Mr Gropp as not do a day work now 3 Weeks to morrow i did a little last week and hope to do a little this week i was going to ask you if you Could lend me 4/ till Saturday for the Landlord to night to save him sending the Brokers in i dont whant to go to the Workhouse if i can help it he will be heare about eaight to night." When sickness creeps in, the East-ender's lot is sad indeed : " To The Reaverant Mr Free please could you oblige me with a little coal or milk as I have had my son ill for a fortnight with dipferior and it as cost me a Lot for fireing and milk having to fire on. Very sorry to Trouble you. Mrs. WORCESTER." " Dear Sur could you oblige Mrs. Stiver With a little coles as i have got my husbent Laid up this Last Week and i have got to keep too fire going if you could i shuld Be very much oblige to you Mrs. Stiver, very sorry to trouble you Yours to oblige." 224 SEVEN YEARS' HARD The East End mother does the begging, as I said ; but it is for her children, not for herself, she pleads : " Dear Sur I am very sorry to trouble you again for a little help as my husband as done no work for 5 weeks I cant abar to .see to see the children hungry I hope I wont hab to drouble you again as it is very much against me to asked for anything but I am forst to. Mrs. STREMSEN." " pies Mister fee chould you help me With a little has Mister hart hant din no Work this Week and i hant got no fard and no faring for my little shildren i ham very sorry to trouble you from Mises HART." Can we wonder that these people are indifferent, when the wolf is howling incessantly at the door ? Is it surprising that they are ready to be all things to all men, that they may by all means get something ? Can we conscientiously condemn their hypocritical acceptance of our spiritual ministrations in view of the tickets for grocery that are to follow ? Nevertheless, the material interpretation of that little word " help " is at times very hard to bear. There was Happy Clive. At ten years of age that child was a confirmed kleptomaniac. When everybody had given her up as hopeless, I took her in hand, invoking the combined powers of kindness and firmness. Every Tuesday at four she came to me, and I asked her three questions : " Have you lied since last week ? " " Have you stolen anything ? " " Have you asked God to keep you truthful and honest ? " More often than not, after denial or elaborate equivocation, she had to acknowledge a slip or two. Then followed reasoning, exhortation, and SOUP-TICKET PHILANTHROPY 225 prayer. It was tedious work, but I struggled on ; and I believe I was instrumental in saving Happy from a House of Correction, which in all likelihood would have hardened her into a professional criminal. Well, one day Mrs. Clive met my wife and began " laying off" about the sins of the clergy in general, and of myself in particular. " But, really," Mrs. Free expostulated, " you ought to be the very last person to complain, seeing what a great deal of help my husband has given your little girl." " 'Elp ? " screeched Mrs. Clive. " Wot 'elp ? 'E ain't 'elped no child of mine, as / know of." ' But, surely, you remember how he took Happy in hand and influenced her for good, and " "Q\\.,thet!" cried Mrs. Clive, with unconcealed relief; " I thought as you meant he give her somethink." It was Mrs. Crusty, whose peculiar notions on matri- mony I have related elsewhere, who left for a distant parish with the lofty remark, " You may say so. I'm glad enough to go. Not as I've got anything agin Mr. Free ; but " with a sage wag of the head" there ain't much to be got out of *im." From the East-ender's point of view, the parson is a creature to be squeezed, and is of some use until he is squeezed dry. A group of women were chatting at the corner of Cahir Street one afternoon. " Well, and what are you good folks gossiping about ? " said I, cheerily. A sour-faced stranger answered, with evident inten- tion "I was telling 'em wot a lot of 'elp our church gives us." Six of our women seceded from us at one fell Q X 226 SEVEN YEARS' HARD swoop ; not because they doubted the validity of our orders or the reality of our sacraments, but because, by virtue of the efforts of an enterprising lady in the neighbourhood, they could get tea, once a week at least, for nothing. Mrs. Boughton was exceedingly frank in the matter. " Wy did I leave ? " said she. " Wy, for wot I could get ! " Is it surprising that the spiritual functions of the clergy are lost sight of? Thousands of East-enders claim help from the parson, not as their privilege, but as their right. Mrs. Totteridge is a particularly good representative of her class, yet she sent me this letter : " I think it very hard that I have to take every penny of my girl's earnings and she has to put up with girls calling her rags and people in work getting relief tickets and when I ask for a ticket for food my name is not sent in and I ought to get it." Pauline was no cadger ; yet one day I caught her slipping into the free dinners intended for the very poorest children. " Hallo ! " said I, " what are you doing here ? Father is in work, isn't he ? " Pauline flushed a rosy red, but she put a bold, not to say brazen, face on the matter. " The dinners is here, and I may as well have 'em," said she, with a defiant thrust of her well-shaped chin. Mrs. Totteridge and Pauline both gave expression to the same sentiment, namely, that, whether in want or not, they were perfectly justified in getting as much out of the parson as they could. That is the idea. And it is that idea which utterly destroys the possibility of spiritual work of any real kind, and makes the East-ender indifferent to the SOUP-TICKET PHILANTHROPY 227 clergyman except in so far as he can fleece him. How well I remember having my eyes opened to this un- pleasant fact ! It was in the days of my first curacy, and I was, I believe, as fastidious as could be wished. Academic to the finger-tips, I regarded with ill-concealed disdain everything of a practical nature. I was obliged to fulfil many distasteful duties. I turned up my nose at them, but I did them. My taste was most deeply offended by the weekly soup-kitchen. The smell positively stung me. The straggling queue of unkempt humanity filled me with false shame. Yet I was as convinced as could be that no one, not even a child, would identify me with such vulgar associations. I was to suffer a rude awakening. One day I was called to a house of sickness, and was waiting for admission when 1 overheard the following conversation between two little girls seated on the kerb : " Do you know who that is ? " " No. Who ? " " Garn ! You do know." " I don't. Tell us ! " " Wy, that's the soup-ticket man ! " The moral is plain to anyone who is not asphyxiated with the fumes of false benevolence. The parson, as philanthropist-in-chief, is " the soup-ticket man," and he has himself to blame if he is little else. He has done his best to spoil the East-ender, in whose estimation he is half knave, half fool. "If anything can be got out of him, so much the better ; he gets enough out of us." That summarises the East-ender's position. The sense that he is being made capital of is strong within him. " There goes the pennies from the poor-box ! " shouted Q 2 228 SEVEN YEARS' HARD a working-man, as a clerical friend of mine sped by on his bicycle. That was the notion that the parson ap- propriated funds intended for the poor, and sported a bicycle with them. " Look at it ! That's where our money goes ! " cried an old man in the railway-train, pointing me out with the finger of scorn the notion being that this gentle- man, and all other gentlemen of the same class, were taxed to keep me in idleness. " It's a very funny thing," observed Mrs. Kiddish to the lady at the fried fish shop, " that them Frees always go for a 'oliday dreckly after that there flare-up of theirs, the St. George's concert. It's a shaime, I say, for them to use money in that way, instead of 'elping the pore, as they oughter." Topsy, who was buying a " penn'orth " on her own account, loyally defended us : " Shut your mouth ! I wonder how many times Mr. Free has given you tickets. And you don't suppose he takes the church money, do you ? " " 'Ow else does 'e live, Miss Spitfire ? " " Do you think he has no money of his own ? " said Topsy, with a toss of the head. " Oh, yes, I suppose so," agreed the woman, mock- ingly ; " 'as money of 'is own, an' lives in that stingy little shanty. Wot d' you take me for, girl ? " Is it astonishing that the East-ender should not only be indifferent and ungrateful to the parson, but should actually despise him ? I am told that, once upon a time, clergymen were treated with positive respect, that men and boys would lift their hats to them, that women and girls would curtsey to them. It must have been long, long ago. In the East End, the "bobbing and SOUP-TICKET PHILANTHROPY 229 scraping " days are over in very deed. Little Drayman, the Petit Chose, gravely informed me, one day, that he had written to his father to this effect : " Dear Dad, I see Mr. Free to-day, and he sends his best respects to you." The lad had no thought of rudeness. He merely expressed, in perfectly natural fashion, his view of the relative positions of the labourer and the clergy- man. I remember being absorbed in Lectures pour Tous, when Croly, one of our club-boys, came into the room. He was a slip of fourteen, just fresh from school ; and, catching sight of the title of the periodical I was read- ing, he cried " 'Ullo, Froggy ! Parley- voo ? " Croly 's unconscious impudence, however, paled before the studied insolence of our maid Clara, who, when my wife threatened to report her conduct to the " master," burst on my privacy with a flourish of flounces and a tossing of tumbled hair, and with a real factory screech cried " Master, indeed ! Call that my master ? Good Lord ! " There was a lad in my club named Witson, a solid, stolid, hard-working chap, whose life was unusually dull and grey even among the dull and grey lives of his fellows. One night I called him aside and, in the inno- cence of my heart, asked him to stay for a talk. He was rather sheepish and reluctant about it, at first ; but I finally got him into a chair, with a real cigar between his lips. For five minutes or so he puffed away in silence ; then, with a stretch of intense satisfaction, he murmured " This is all right," puff, puff, "don't mind a good deal of this sort o' thing," puff, puff, "knock off work early just now ; no overtime, you know. If you like," 230 SEVEN YEARS' HARD he dropped his voice to the merest whisper, " I'll come in pretty frequent. What say ? " I muttered some imbecility or other. But Witson was not a fellow to be put off. He returned to the charge again and again during the evening. It was late when he rose to go, loud in praise of my cigars, and very, very happy. I was dead beat. " Good-night ! So-long ! " he said. I was closing the door behind him with a sense of supreme satisfaction, when he suddenly reappeared. " I say ! I just done myself fine to-night To-day's Satur- day ; well, if you like, I'll come again Sunday. What? And look 'ere ! " I was pushing-to the door, but he blocked it with his foot " Look 'ere, Mr. Free ! If you like, I'll come every night." Witson was no ill-mannered cadger ; he was merely human. He had no suspicion of any educational or social barriers. It never occurred to him that he might possibly bore me. I happened to be a man possessed of cigars and a comfortable room to smoke them in, and he was a lad who had a perfect right to enjoy himself at my expense. That was all ! But where did he, and others of his kidney, get the idea that I was a person to be traded upon ? From the spectacle afforded him, I should say, by the rivalries of his self-appointed saviours. Not only has there been an utter absence of anything like co- operation between representatives of philanthropical effort in the East End, but they have actually vied with one another like hawkers. The work has been attempted by the incapable, but ingenuous, rich man ; it has been attempted by the capable, but disingenuous, poor man ; and it would be difficult to say which of the two has SOUP-TICKET PHILANTHROPY 231 done the more harm. The results, however, have been identical in both cases, namely, a condition of unparalleled disorder. Each one, acting on his personal responsibility, and forming a little system of his own, has created an artificial centre of activity, a sort of whirlpool of agita- tion, which, coming in contact with other whirlpools, has produced utter chaos. Church has attacked Chapel, Chapel has attacked Church ; and each of the various nonconforming bodies has, with one accord, established itself at the expense of every other. The very chil- dren have taken on the mutual antagonism. Referring to a dissenting school-fellow, a little girl once said to me, " She says yours is a rotten church." " And what did you say ? " I inquired. " I said J ers was a rottener." In the matter of East End philanthropy, people are under the impression that they can do precisely as they like ; whereas their only excuse for doing anything at all is their power, and not merely their will, to help the East-ender to a better life. We have no prescriptive right to interfere with him, whether he is benefited or not, whether we are qualified or not. Yet if one of our own class is ever so slightly interested in working- people, or if he is hard up for something to do, or if he has more money than wit, we gravely inform him that it is his duty to go and work in the East End ! In Heaven's name, why ? Could anything be more pre- posterous ? Why should superfluity of money or time, or scarcity of brains, be considered sufficient qualifica- tion for a calling which requires special training of head and heart such as is demanded by no other profession ? It is conceivable that there are persons in Berkeley Square who are interested in Hampstead. Yet I never 232 SEVEN YEARS' HARD heard of sentimental Belgravian ladies, whose time hung heavily, driving up Haverstock Hill with the purpose of improving its tone. Haverstock Hill would object. At the very lowest computation, the East of London is as important as the North- West ; and which is a point much overlooked the East-ender objects to being patronised by the West-ender quite as much as the dweller in the North- West would. Unfortunately for the East-ender, however, he has no means of expressing his objection, and, indeed, has got so used to the buns of the philanthropists that he has come to look upon them the philanthropists, not the buns : the buns are always toothsome as a kind of disagreeable necessity which must be made the best of. So Autolycus floods the market with his worthless wares ; and the market, being otherwise incapable, smiles hypocritically. The direct result of religious and philanthropical rivalry is bribery in its grossest forms. Take the follow- ing as an example of the kind of thing that is going on all over the East End to-day. The Nonconformists " get hold of" a lad who has fallen into evil ways. The boy is induced to join several societies connected with the chapel club, brigade, Bible-class, and so on ; and all goes merrily for a time. Then the secretary of the club, the captain of the brigade, or the leader of the Bible- class happens to offend him. He does not trouble to quarrel not he ! He merely says, with a fine, com- placent shrug of the shoulders, " Very well ! I'll go to church, then." And to church he goes. In three months he is back again, church having hurt his feelings ; and the Dissenters, recognising him for a veritable brand plucked from the burning, make sure of him for ever and ever by bribing him to the top of his bent. SOUP-TICKET PHILANTHROPY 233 Individualism ! Sectarianism ! Bribery ! What have they not to answer for ? When a " Christian " society give veritable pennies to the children of another Christian society in order to induce them to "come over " ; when " Christians " invade a parish, and, under the guise of helping the helpless, load with unmerited gifts those who already are being systematically assisted ; when inducements are offered to all and sundry to come and make a profession of religion which can have no root either in head or in heart, it is surely the sheerest hypocrisy to wonder why Christianity the Christianity of Christ does not make more headway. Nor does the mischief end even here. The divisions within the Church of England itself have immensely aggravated the evil case of the East-ender. Take that arbitrary classification of Churchmen into Protestant and Catholic. What could be more ridiculous ? Every Anglican is both Protestant and Catholic : Protestant, in so far as he protests against the claims and superstitions of the Papal See ; Catholic, inasmuch as he holds to primitive doctrine and practice. To create an artificial cleavage between the two terms is to invite the con- tempt of thinking men and the distrust of the unthink- ing. Yet that is precisely what is occurring at this moment throughout the East End. Differences respect- ing minor matters are being exalted by ignorant mischief-makers into serious divergences of opinion. One labels himself of Paul, another of Apollos ; the house seems to be divided against itself; the man in, the street smiles ; and the East-ender makes up his philosophical mind to get all he can out of everybody. The root-evil of all such eccentricities lies, not in the sensational character of certain religious services, nor in 234 SEVEN YEARS' HARD the danger of the promulgation of certain religious doctrines, but in the irresponsible individualism which, recognising no authority, claims exemption from all law. Men and women, endowed with more business capacity than spiritual grace, are running their own little "shows" for their own little glory, pathetically oblivious of the scorn of the working-man, for whose sake they are supposed to be laying down their lives. To the man who has the eyes to see, and the honesty to speak of, things as they are, and not as they appear through the rose-coloured spectacles assumed by many of us, this sort of thing would really be heart-breaking were it not actually side-splitting. That anyone, un- cultured, ambitious, poor, and therefore particularly susceptible to the glamour of success, should be allowed to assume the position of a lord or lady bountiful, smilingly doling out relief provided by the " charitable," is surely one of the most surprising factors of our modern life. I recall the tactics of a certain Christian body which shall be nameless. It was during one of the late terrible winters that they emerged from their native obscurity as the redeemers of the East End. In common with other Christian denominations they had been entrusted with the distribution of funds contributed by the public ; and they combined business with religion in a most original manner. " Put case," as " Caliban " would say. I, a boozer and a cadger, hearing that something is to be " give away " at Salem Chapel, and not being above asking for it, wend my way thither, in company with some hundreds of like-minded brethren, on a Wednesday evening. My name is taken down, and I am told to present myself on the following Sunday night at six SOUP-TICKET PHILANTHROPY 235 o'clock. In addition, I am cordially invited to a " Pleasant Afternoon for Men Only," from four to six, when tea and tobacco will be provided gratis. Such an arrangement suits me admirably ; and, when Sunday afternoon comes, I enjoy my drink and my smoke in spite of the religious talk of the gentleman in the white tie. At six o'clock, the tea and tobacco having come to an untimely end, I receive a pressing invitation to " stay to the service " ; and as I have not forgotten that the distribution of tickets is still to come, I do so. A hymn- book is put in my hand, and I sing as lustily as any of them. The gentleman in the white tie says, " Let us pray," and I put my nose in my cap. When the gentle- man in the white tie begins his talk again, I sit as patient as a donkey, always remembering the relief tickets. Then comes another hymn ; and then, at last, the thrilling announcement from the gentleman in the white tie that he is now about to give out the tickets, " or, rather, was," he adds ; " for, as the Gospel is now to be preached by means of a series of tableaux vivants> I invite my friends to stay to that service, after which I will distribute the tickets." I am disappointed ; for the evening is slipping away, and Tom and Dick are waiting for me at the " Bricklayers' Arms." A pretty time I shall get of it if I return empty-handed ! But it can't be helped. Into the " Gospel by tableaux vivants " I go, and endure a third spell of religious talk. For another half-hour I sit nearly as patient as a donkey, and audibly grunt with satisfaction when the lights are at length turned up and the thing is over. In my gratitude I even put my last penny in the plate. Then the gentle- man in the white tie gives out the tickets, calling each recipient by name. There are about three hundred 236 SEVEN YEARS' HARD applicants, only thirty-five tickets, and not a solitary one for me. I am naturally furious, and, remembering Tom and Dick, am preparing to give the gentleman in the white tie a bit of my mind, when he raises his hand, silences the babel of voices, and says, in the sincerest tone imaginable, " I'm sorry that any should be disap- pointed, but come again next Sunday, and no doubt you will be more fortunate. Now let us sing the Doxology." One plain word on that subtlest of all forms of bribery I mean flattery, and I have done with soup-ticket philanthropy. To flatter the East-ender by minimising his vices and magnifying his virtues is a sure way of becoming popular ; and there are those who, finding in the daily offering of this unwholesome sacrifice the only chance of life, use it unstintingly. Such workers are too smooth-tongued. They are one thing to the faces of the people, another behind their backs. Afraid to rebuke their vices, they overrate their virtues, and, knowing that popularity will secure immunity from most of the penalties of living among an alien race, they make up their minds to be popular at any price. They have their reward. And so had the hypocrites of old. To refrain from opposing such methods of " compel- ling them to come in," with all its concomitant toadyism, vulgarity, and hypocrisy, would be in the highest degree disloyal to the spirit of Christ ; and, until some common basis of action can be found which shall be honest as well as earnest, and which shall pay more regard to the elevation of the working-man than to the exaltation of any particular cult, I fear the redemption of the East End is outside the range of practical politics. To gild the pill with bribery or flattery is to court and ensure SOUP-TICKET PHILANTHROPY 237 failure. When the gilt has been scratched off, the pill will be discarded. The East-ender, no less than his more cultured brother of the West, believes little or not at all in the thing he can get for nothing ; but he values the thing he pays for. And Christianity will never be the power it ought to be in the East End until the system of giving everything for nothing has been finally abandoned as unscientific and fruitless. CHAPTER X CHRISTIANITY A FAILURE THE reader of the foregoing pages will not be sur- prised to learn that Christianity does not " count " in the East End. There are eminent exceptions to the rule, but that is the rule. The average East-ender's indifference to, and ignorance of, Christianity and all that appertains to it are almost beyond belief. In my early days at Millwall it was an impracticable feat to secure at any religious service a " quorum," if I may be allowed the expression. Try how we might, we could not succeed in "gathering together" even the "two or three." It would be impossible to exaggerate the heart-sinking that would seize me when, on arriving at our temporary chapel on Sunday mornings, I would discover half-a- dozen tiny children, hand in hand, waiting for the doors to open. " There's our congregation ! " I would say, not without bitterness. It seemed to me so strange and terrible that Christianity should be considered no religion for strong men and kind women. In view of religious backwardness or shyness, one of my evangelists proposed a series of extremely simple mission services. I heartily concurred and provided him with some thousands of handbills. With these he CHRISTIANITY A FAILURE 239 called personally on several hundred families, from most of whom he obtained a definite promise to come to his first meeting. The good man was new to the East End, and was full of hope that he would have a crowded house. When the great evening arrived, his congrega- tion numbered exactly twelve persons, eight of whom were regular church-goers. Our Window Gardening Society caught on amazingly, and enormous quantities of seeds, bulbs, and plants were distributed gratis to its members. In the third year of its existence, I inaugurated an annual service, which thirty stalwarts entered into a solemn league and covenant to support, seeming really anxious to show their appreciation of the encouragement given them to cultivate flowers. " We shall have thirty, any- how," observed my wife, brightly. On the appointed day we got two. This appalling irreligiousness is one of the things it takes so long to understand. I had a notion, founded on previous experience, that a well-known man, who was both earnest and unconventional, might draw. So I invited the Rev. J. L. Lyne, the " Llanthony Monk," to come and stir us up. At that very time, this popular preacher was attracting immense crowds of men in the middle of the day at St. Sepulchre's, Holborn ; but, although I advertised him unstintingly, a mere handful of people came to hear him. Millwall declined to be drawn even by his shaven pate and sandalled feet. Apropos of Mr. Lyne's visit, a significant story reached me. About half-an-hour before the advertised time of the meeting, one of my choirmen remarked to his brother " I must be off, Sam. Father Ignatius is preaching to-night. There's sure to be a fearful crush." 2 4 o SEVEN YEARS' HARD " Fearful crush ! " echoed Sam. " Do you know Millwall, Alf ? Why, if the Queen was advertised to do a skirt-dance, there wouldn't be fifty people to see her." Well do I remember the preparations I made for the first anniversary of the dedication of St. Cuthbert's. I invited several clergymen to preach ; I worked the choir up to tackle a special anthem ; I advertised our pro- posed doings on huge posters. Dedication day arrived. It was a magnificent evening. I was jubilant. "The weather won't keep people away," said I to myself ; " I positively believe we shall have a congregation." When the hour of service struck, there was not a solitary soul in church. Everybody, including the choir, had scampered off to see a procession a mile away. Nor were we Church folk peculiar in our failure to get people interested in Christianity. At one time a deter- mined effort was made by the Salvation Army to attract a crowd in the West Ferry Road. The men stood in the doorways, smoking their pipes with unstudied indifference ; the women foregathered at convenient corners, nursing their babies and discussing the latest scandal. A long-legged boy swung down the street, shouting, " Are you saved ? Come to Jesus ! " A woman cried out, " Wy, 'ere's the Army now ! " and a neighbour added, with a shrill squeal that was intended for a laugh, " Well, I'm blest ! Let 'em all come ! " Women are generally supposed to be more amenable to Christian teaching than men. I have not found them so. Men may be harder to catch, but they stick faster. When a man " gets religion," he is in dead earnest about it. Nothing will keep him away from it wife, children, neighbours ; and I have known those whose lives have been made a horrible burden to them CHRISTIANITY A FAILURE 241 by the fleering of wife and children, to say nothing of neighbours. Once having begun the thing, however, the man sets his teeth and goes through with it to the end ; and not infrequently it is a very bitter end. Nor is persecution the only foe the Christian working- man has to contend with. There is a subtler and still more dangerous enemy, namely, kindness. He is such a rara avis that he is apt to get spoiled and give himself airs. In the old gin-palace days his very sincerity in irreligion almost compelled respect ; in the new church-going days there is about him a concentrated self-righteousness, not to say smugness, which is not always agreeable to con- template. The fact of the matter is that the shepherd's anxiety to draw the wandering sheep into the fold is so excessive that occasionally he oversteps the bounds of decency, and succeeds, not only in saving the sheep, but also in giving the animal an unwarrantable opinion of his own importance. Even so, it is marvellous how such a man, when his conscience or his heart has really been touched, will in good time come to himself ; and there is no better type of manhood in England than that of the East End working-man who has conscientiously em- braced Christianity. His nerve, his dogged determina- tion, his good-humoured tolerance, his serious devotion to duty, are admirable beyond words. With the woman it is different. Her religious re- sponsibilities are so easily assumed that they are quite as easily discarded. She is so readily converted that her conversion may prove worthless. Yet she, too, can be splendidly heroical. I have known girls scarce in their 'teens go through the fire of persecution without flinching. The married Christian woman is often a martyr of no mean type. Should her husband object R 242 SEVEN YEARS' HARD to religion which is extremely likely the moment she puts on her bonnet to go to church, he dons his hat for the public-house. An evening of beer-swilling and a night of violence are sure to follow. So, having to choose between her husband's sobriety and peace, and the gratification of her religious instincts and war, the woman selects the line of least resistance, takes her bonnet off, and sits down to await her lord's pleasure. Mrs. Brummell's case was typical. Married to a toper, her religious inclinations were cruelly dis- couraged. " I was brought up to love God," she said to me one day, "and I would gladly come to church if I could." " And why can't you ? " I asked not without sus- picion ; for I seemed to have heard the remark before. Mrs. Brummell's answer was a strange one : " Well, the only night on which he stays at 'ome is Sunday, and that he does because he thinks I want to go to church. I dursn't move while he is in the 'ouse ; but when seven strikes, and he knows it is too late, out he slips, and I see no more of him till past midnight." " But why don't you go after he has left ? " I asked, with unpardonable innocence, considering my long sojourn in the East End. " Why ? " She slipped up her sleeve, and showed me her bare arm bruised black and yellow in four places. " That's why." It is not easy to understand why the East End working-man should allow his children to be taught the Christianity which he repudiates. Yet he does so, and is, at times, not a.little proud of the fact. On a summer excursion I happened to be travelling with the father of one of our little Sunday-school girls. The pride of the CHRISTIANITY A FAILURE 243 man in his daughter's devotion to religion was curious. Over and over again he told me how she would snuggle up to him with, " I'm going to church, daddy. Won't you come?" "Yes, that's my little gel! That's my Ida, that is ! " he kept on saying. He was so pleased and proud that I ventured to ask him whether he had ever yielded to the child's persuasions ; and at that he opened his eyes very wide. " Wot, me ? Me go to church ? " he fairly sniggered at the notion ; " O' course not." While some parents are really anxious to have their children brought up in the Christian faith, others will not oppose teaching which "won't do 'em no harm even if it don't do } em no good." One of my girls was in service, and her mistress mirabile dictu ! wished her to be confirmed. The astonishing fact was communicated to the mother. " I don't know as that's a bad thing for a girl," she indulgently observed, when she had succeeded in grasp- ing the idea. " When I was a young 'un I was done myself, and used to go to the what-you-may-call-it reg'lar." "The Holy Communion. Well, why don't you do so now ? " asked my wife. " Example is better than precept, you know." " No, no ! It ain't in my line. But Polly's of age to judge for 'erself. She can get confirmed if she likes ; and I sha'n't say a single word against it. There ! " It is not surprising that the promise of the child's life is unfulfilled, and that the most appalling ignorance of things religious abounds among old and young alike. That little or nothing is known of the Book of Common R 2 244 SEVEN YEARS' HARD Prayer, goes without saying. To Mrs. Typum must be awarded the palm for, perhaps, the most extraordinary excuse for religious slackness ever invented. " You see, I am used to the old Prayer Books," she said. " They was so different when I was a girl to what they are now. But if you'd let me have a look at one o' them new ones, so I might get used to the alterations, per'aps I might be able to come to church again, after all these years." Ignorance of the Prayer Book occasionally produces some quaint results. One of my greatest difficulties is to get godparents to make the proper responses at baptisms. Having no idea of the meaning of the service, they are prone to wander from the point. So I have provided cards on which the answers for sponsors are printed in unmistakable capitals. The first god- parent who used the new cards was a stevedore, a rough giant of a fellow, who evidently felt his position keenly, and kept one eye on the door. By dint, however, of a friendly smile or two, I managed to hold him in. After a while, to my astonishment, the service actually appeared to interest him. He gazed at his card with an intensity which was most gratifying, and once he said Amen quite loudly and heartily. I was enchanted. Apart from the rarity of godparents of any kind, and especially of godfathers, it is most unusual for a sponsor to make a response. So I beamed encouragingly upon this model godfather, and, proceeding to the questions, asked him whether, in the name of his godchild, he renounced the devil and all his works. To this he should have replied, " I renounce them all." But he didn't. With knit brows and heaving breast, he stared at the print held tremblingly not three inches from his CHRISTIANITY A FAILURE 245 nose. I waited during a tense minute. The come-and- go of the man's breath was audible, his bristly chin quivered with emotion, the sweat stood in beads upon his forehead. At the end of sixty seconds I tried prompting. " I renounce them all," I whispered, and repeated the sentence again and again, louder and still louder ; and at last was rewarded by seeing the model godfather lift a pair of the most innocent blue eyes to mine. " I renounce them all," I said again, waxing impatient. The burly stevedore nodded with every sign of satisfaction, as who should say, " Of course you do " ; and then, girding up his loins for a supreme effort, he bellowed at the top of his voice the words of the rubric, " Then shall he answer and say," and swelled with pride at his extraordinary performance. Nor is the Bible better known than the Prayer Book. When I was preparing Cassandra for confirmation, we happed on the clause in the Creed about Pontius Pilate. " Who was he ? " I asked. Cassandra's answer was promptness itself, " God ! " Scarcely less astonishing was Jenny Kilsby's dis- covery. Jenny was anxious to be a Sunday School teacher ; and, in order to ascertain how she was likely to handle a subject in class, I lent her a book, and bade her to prepare the Parable of the Unmerciful Servant. The lesson was all about forgiveness ; and a warning story was added of an incendiary who, in revenge for a supposed insult, set fire to a neighbour's dwelling. In due course Jenny appeared for examination, all import- ance and nervousness. "Well, have you thoroughly mastered the lesson ? " I inquired. Jenny assured me that she had. " Good ! Now, what is the leading idea in it ? " 246 SEVEN YEARS' HARD " Oh ! Just for nastiness," said Jenny, with a flash of unspeakable scorn, " that old man went and set a pore feller's 'ouse afire." " Old man ! What old man ? " " Why, Peter ! " That ignorance both of Bible and Prayer Book should abound is, perhaps, not surprising in view of the limited opportunities of the East-ender. But it will scarcely be believed, perhaps, that there are middle-aged people in the East End who do not know the Lord's Prayer. Mrs. Baccle was dying, and I was summoned to her bedside. Her mind was perfectly clear ; and I was able to read with her and pray with her. She caught with avidity at the closing supplication. " Ah ! that's an old prayer, that is ; I used to say that when I was a little gal, ' Our Father, 'chart in 'eaven, 'chart in 'eaven ' ' I prompted the poor soul pretty freely, but she could get no further. Mrs. Grapestone, who had been ill for a long time, collapsed suddenly at the end. There was no time to send for me. A thoughtful neighbour suggested that somebody should say the Lord's Prayer, and a small boy was grabbed out of the street and hurried into the sick-room. "Tommy, say the Lord's Prayer, there's a good boy ! " " Don't know it," said Tommy. "Arst him if he knows 'Our Father,'" said the thoughtful neighbour. " Father's at work," said Tommy, with conscious pride. There are two, and only two, points wherein the East- ender voluntarily comes in contact with the religion ot CHRISTIANITY A FAILURE 247 his forefathers ; and even there, it must be confessed his (or, rather, her) adherence is more of a superstitious than of a strictly religious type. I refer to christenings and churchings. Every new addition to the family must be christened ; otherwise, calamity will befall it ! The wise regulation of the Church of England respecting godparents is either totally neglected or else fulfilled in a fashion which would be profane were it not so innocently ludicrous, as the instance quoted above goes to show. With regard to churchings, no self-respecting East End mother would dream of coming out for the first time after the birth of her child for any other reason than " to go to church." She may never see the inside of the building at any other time ; she may be a rank Dissenter ; indeed, her morals may be as shady as her manners are seductive. These things make no sort of difference. Churched she must be, and churched she is ; and when, kneeling humbly at the altar, she drops her penny into the little white bag, she is ready to depart in peace until the next baby is born. The men laugh at their wives, and stoutly refuse to be parties to such superstitious practices, but for the most part they are not displeased. Some day who knows ? when the revival of Christianity comes, these remnants of a forgotten past may be the nucleus of a great uprising of spiritual fervour. It is strange, indeed, to reflect that women who are most punctilious with regard to their children's baptism, not only neglect but are fiercely antagonistic to their confirmation. It would be impossible to exaggerate the difficulty I used to experience in getting my young people confirmed. What with the opposition of the parents and the laxity of the children themselves, I 248 SEVEN YEARS' HARD used to be well-nigh distracted. The omnibus destined to convey the candidates to the church was drawn up close to the kerb ; yet the task of running the gauntlet across the narrow strip of pavement was almost too much for all, and actually more than some could bear, so that flight of the indecorous kind at the last moment was not unknown. When, at length, the bolder spirits plucked up courage to face the music, they were greeted with cheerful remarks, punctuated with roars of laughter, from their friends of all ages. As thus : " Wy, that's Rags-an'-tatters, that is ! There's a picture for yer ! . . O my ! ain't 'e a swell ! Look at 'is trousiz ! . . . I've a jolly good mind to be conferred myself." The East-ender's view of the Church of England is extremely limited and one-sided. His conception of her functions is entirely erroneous ; of her ideals and practical possibilities he has no conception whatever. In his opinion the Church is financed by the capitalist to teach the poor contentment. Therefore he is not enamoured of the clergyman, whom he regards as the slave of an obsolete system tottering to its grave, and only kept on its shaky legs by mean old women and ignorant children. The parson stands to him for the conservative selfishness of the rich and privileged, for the tyranny of those inexorable powers which have com- bined to keep him tied hand and foot to that station of life to which a cruel destiny has called him. Nor has he any better opinion of Dissent. He abhors its respectability and its sentimentality. If he be honest, he spurns its bribes ; if he be dishonest, he accepts them with mental reservations. Dissent strikes him as an attempt to silence the divine discontent within him with sensational claptrap and halfpenny buns. CHRISTIANITY A FAILURE 249 His Sunday newspaper backs him up in'his scepticism. He is not yet sufficiently well educated to think for himself; nor does he understand that even a Sunday newspaper may lie ; but he is only too ready to believe that every new thing is as likely to be true as that every old thing is likely to be false. His doubt is deepened, as I have already intimated, by the amateurish efforts of the inefficient to redeem him. He laughs in his sleeve at their fussiness and ignorance. They amuse him in the same way as the antics of some lively little animal might do ; otherwise they affect him neither one way nor the other. The net result of our almost superhuman efforts to draw the East-ender into the fold is that he treats the matter as a joke and declines to be drawn. He has discovered, as I said, that the gilded pill is still a pill ; that we have tempted him by a pleasant outside merely in order to get him to swallow without grimace the nauseous inside. Naturally, he resents that kind of thing, and contempt of religion is the result. Moreover, Christianity, as we understand it to-day, is a new thing to him. The up-to-date parson, hard- working, genial, hail-fellow-well-met, fatherly, steeped in the principles of Socialism, full of faith in the religion he professes, is a new and somewhat disturbing element. He fails to understand him. History, tradition, the unwritten law, have all taught him to expect a clergy- man to be of a certain type ; when history, tradition, and the law are contradicted in the apparently worldly- minded ecclesiastic, who takes life cheerfully, yet is fore- most in helping lame dogs over stiles, the East-ender is astonished but not convinced, and will go no farther than to assure you that he is absolutely free from prejudices. 250 SEVEN YEARS' HARD " But why don't you come to church ? " Picton was once asked by a lady visitor. " Well, I can't quite say," was the puzzled answer ; " but " with a luminous flash " I can assure you, miss, that I've got nothing agin Mr. Free, and I've got nothing agin you, and I've got nothing agin none of you." Even when the East-ender is inclined to believe, as he sometimes is, that the parson is real in his desire to do him good, it is as hard as ever for him to credit him with reality in other directions. When, for instance, he hears Bible stories, which are stories in more senses than one, solemnly read at the lectern or quoted in the pulpit as facts, it is not surprising that he is doubtful of the parson's sincerity. Or, again, when he reads in the public prints letters from clergymen denying the doc- trines contained in the Creeds, and at the same time is aware that these unbelieving gentlemen are legally bound to recite those Creeds regularly Sunday by Sunday, his belief in the clergy and in the Church which supports them is not strengthened. Only one East-ender in a hundred attends any place of worship, we are told. The church- or chapel-goer is looked upon as a crank or a hypocrite. Well for him if he escapes with nothing worse than a suspicion of eccen- tricity. He is much more likely, however, to be charged with downright insincerity. " To go to church for what you can get " is regarded, and rightly, as the sure mark of the beast. Unfortunately, the majority of East- enders can conceive of no other motive for a profession of religion. Consequently, all church-goers, good, bad, and indifferent, are involved in a common denunciation. As they walk down their street or court, they are greeted CHRISTIANITY A FAILURE 251 with such pleasantries as " There goes the religious man ! " " There goes the Christian woman ! " " How much do they pay you for doing it ? " " Church to-day, drunk to-morrow ! " and so on. Sad to relate, the notion that one is religious because it pays is not altogether without foundation in fact. The harvest thanksgiving, for example, is the only service which attracts to any appreciable degree ; and the distri- bution of the fruit and vegetables with which the church is decorated on such an occasion has much more to do with its popularity than most of us would care to acknowledge. Or again. Shopan was so regular in his choir attend- ances that I congratulated his mother on the fact. "Yes," agreed Mrs. Shopan, with a little flutter of maternal pride ; " that boy never stays away if I knows it. It's for his good to stick to his choir and his church." " I am delighted to hear you say so," said I, warmly, " and I wish with all my heart there were more mothers who took that view of religion." " They would save their sons many a pair of trousers," cried the good lady, triumphantly, " that they would ! With the money that boy gets from his choir, he hasn't cost me a penny for clothes for two whole years." Mrs. Shopan was pretty commercial, but Gyp was worse. This disreputable character was calling on me one day for something or other, when I seized the oppor- tunity of reprimanding him on his dissolute habits, and especially for boasting, as he frequently did, of having been convicted of drunkenness no less than thirty-seven times. " Like the rest of us, you will have to die some day," I said severely. " What would you do if you were to die to-night ? " 252 SEVEN YEARS' HARD " What Bradlaugh did," he hiccoughed. 11 And that ? " " Bradlaugh said, * Loramercy on my soul ! ' That's wot I'd say * Loramercy on my soul ! ' And mind you, mister, if I said it with the last bit of bref in my body, it 'd be all right. I should be as safe as the Bank of England." "What!" I cried, "you think you would get to heaven by crying for mercy at the last moment ? " " That's my belief," said Gyp, making a compliment- ary duck of the head in my direction, and nearly over- balancing himself, " my firm belief, per-wided I 'ad a reverend shentleman to 'elp me." It is all to the credit of the honest East-ender that he despises such hollow mockeries and will have none of them. But, unfortunately, he confounds the good with the bad, and resolutely turns his back on all profession of Christianity whatsoever. I was in Millwall a year and a half before a man came to my services. He was a genial little chap with a cast-iron smile. He came, he saw, was not conquered, and went away never to return. Spankiron would bring his wife as far as the church door, and then fly into the darkness like one possessed. Many a man has confessed to me that " he would like to go in, but dursn't " ; and I have known young fellows hang about outside during the whole of the time of service, listening to the music, but not having the courage to enter. In summer it is a common sight to see groups of people in Cahir Street, on which St. Cuthbert's abuts, enjoying the preaching and singing, both of which can be heard distinctly through the open windows ; but the extreme probability is that not one of those persons has ever entered the church, save for a CHRISTIANITY A FAILURE 253 churching or a baptism, and that nothing short of a second Deluge would induce them to do so and then they would climb on to the roof! Not until the fourth year of my work in the East End was I asked to give the Holy Communion to a sick person ; and even then there was some doubt about the bond fides of the astounding request. I am confining myself to the strict truth when I say that, in my experience, not one summons to the sick and dying out of a thousand has had a higher object than relief tickets. Facts like these speak for themselves. Christianity is discredited in the East End. The people will have none of it. Ministers of all denominations are regarded with suspicion and distrust. They are a class, and they represent all the abuses of class privilege, from tub- thumping to auricular confession. That feeling of class has raised barriers where none need have existed ; it has precluded the possibility of honest and straight- forward discussion ; it has created a terror of things religious, which no subsequent explanations have been able to allay. From the tub to the confessional, I say. It is a mistake to suppose that either method has succeeded in the East End. The man who wears out his wit and his voice in shrieking salvation to an amused but otherwise unedified people is regarded with as deep distrust as the coped and mitred bishop. He may season his preaching with genuine slang ; he may con- descend to the most vulgar ostentation ; he may try to blind his audience with a liberal supply of gold-dust. All, all in vain. As for the confessional, I have in my mind an East End vicar who drove the boys and girls of his parish thither like a flock of frightened sheep. What was the result ? As soon as his personal tyranny was 254 SEVEN YEARS' HARD withdrawn, most of those young people turned their backs upon Christianity for good and all. A young married woman, who in her single days had attended this clergyman's church, complained to me of the de- moralising effect of auricular confession. Her words were : " Evils were suggested to me that I had never dreamed of." That is so. The confessional is an insult to the nobility of our human nature, relegating us to the company of the swine. Its advocates are not con- fined to the ranks of the clergy. There are lay persons whose devotion in this regard is worthy of a better cause, women or, less frequently, men of unclean mind. Such persons incline to dwell on the carnal side of things, protesting that they love, even passionately love, boys and girls ; and in the mirrds of the children who are so unfortunate as to come under their influence, they succeed in stirring up all the dormant dirt in hiding there, and create a loathing for the very name of religion which bears its bitter fruit in incurable antagon- ism to Christianity. One of the flock of old Cricklethorpe was a woman whose husband had an undying hatred of religion in any form. Cricklethorpe, being a man of many excel- lent parts and very wide awake in matters clerical, used to confine his pastoral visits to hours when the husband was not in evidence. A day came when the poor woman lay a-dying, and sent post-haste for her con- fessor, who arrived in due course, and was in the act of administering the last rites when the husband appeared. He would not go into the room, however, but tramped the pavement in front of the house in exceeding wrath. When the parson came out, he sprang at him like a tiger. Two men held him back. A crowd quickly gathered. CHRISTIANITY A FAILURE 255 " Have you done it ? " shrieked the husband, struggling to free himself. " I have," answered Cricklethorpe, firmly. " Lemme get at 'im ! Lemme get at 'im, I say ! I'll teach him to go worryin' my missus, I will." At the word he broke away, and bore down upon the astonished clergyman like a fury. But the little man was equal to the occasion. " Stop ! " he cried, authorita- tively. The fellow halted in sheer amazement. " Well, what now ? " he said. The little man drew himself up to his full height, and observed with the utmost composure "If you dare to totch me with so motch as a lee tie fingare, I tear your goots out." The story teaches a plain lesson to all who are willing to learn. Yet the East End is not without belief of a kind. Glowers, my odd-job man, put his own position very plainly, unconsciously, as I think, representing that of a vast number of East End working-men : " No, I don't go to church ; never did, and never will. To my mind, churches, chapels, and parsons ain't no class. They're always squabblin' ; and if a feller has anythin' to do with 'em, he gets to squabblin' too, and turns out a jolly sight wuss than he was before. But " he lifted his dripping paint-brush to emphasise his remark " I don't deny as there ain't a Human Been somewheres wot's a lot bigger than wot I am." Many men, however, are not satisfied with the some- what indefinite belief of Glowers and his kind. They want facts, and facts they will have. My appearance in an omnibus or a tram-car has often been the 256 SEVEN YEARS' HARD signal for a fire of cross-questions as to " Who was Cain's wife ? " " Who made the devil ? " and so on. A small, blue-eyed chap on the knifeboard of the local 'bus once gave me a poser. " Who founded the world ? " he asked, apparently addressing the universe. " God," I Answered, promptly. " Right, mister ! " agreed the little man, nodding his grey head like a knowing bird ; " but who founded Him?* I confessed my ignorance, adding in self-defence that nobody knew. " Oh, nobody knows, eh ? " he said, sarcastically, as he screwed up one blue eye and squinted at me sideways with a suggestion of mingled contempt and pity. " Well, I know and I'll tell you. 'E growed : that's wot 'E did." The little man turned his blue eyes heavenward in a way that was infinitely solemn. " 'E growed like a lily, like a lily o' the field." Occasionally the dormant belief of the East-ender will manifest itself in a somewhat surprising fashion. One Sunday evening I was preaching in the West Ferry Road, when a stranger stopped. He listened atten- tively for a time, then suddenly shouted out that I was a humbug for teaching the people to believe in a God. I was in the act of arraying a solid phalanx of incontro- vertible arguments for the discomfiture of my adversary, when the matter was roughly taken out of my hands by the bystanders, who, to my knowledge, never by any chance made a profession of religion. " Mr. Free's quite right," they cried, savagely. " There is a God, and we believe in 'Im too. You shut up ! " That was one of my great moments. All the stress and strain, the disillusions and the disappointments, the CHRISTIANITY A FAILURE 257 heart-breaking failures and the flimsy successes, sud- denly assumed their lawful place. It was a wonderful revelation. How these brothers and sisters of ours are hampered by the sheer inertia of their lives ; how their ears are stopped, their eyes darkened ; yet how, in spite of everything, they are seeking God, if haply they may find Him in a flash it all became clear to me. And then, more wonderful still, I knew what my business was. EPILOGUE " I HAVE read your book," remarked My Candid Friend. " How do you like it ? " said I. " As your friend, my duty is to tell you, not how I like it, but how I dislike it." I nodded resignedly, struck a match, and lighted a cigar (five a shilling). " Pro -ceed," I said, chopping the word in half, and taking three deep pulls and two shallow ones at my cigar. "There are things in your book enough to try the patience of forty Jobs rolled into one," declared My Candid Friend, repudiating the cigar-case I insinuat- ingly pushed towards him. " Well ! well ! " said I, for want of something better to say. "Your book is misinformed, sweeping, censorious, revolutionary " " Stop ! stop ! " I cried, clapping my hands to my ears. " Chapter and verse, for mercy's sweet sake ! " " You shall have them. To take the head and front of your offending first, you have maligned the phil- anthropist." " Not so ! I wage war against principles, not against persons. The exponent of a principle may be eminently EPILOGUE 259 lovable, while the principle itself may be eminently detestable. I simply give it as my opinion that the whole method of work among the poor must be altered. The present system is obsolete, founded on pride and vanity rather than on the love of justice. It grafts on to the East End the toadyism of the village. Phil- anthropists of the kind I have in mind honestly consider that they have done their duty if, as it were, they allow the ' poor ' to kiss the finger-tips graciously extended to them." " Ha ! " exclaimed My Candid Friend, with a long- drawn grunt of dissatisfaction. "You must not be so severe. You forget how excellent are the intentions of these good people ; and if they " " I have been given to understand," I interrupted, " that a certain undesirable locality is paved " " Yes, yes ! We know all about that," cried My Candid Friend, waving his hand in his own superior fashion. "And the sooner we turn our good intentions into good deeds, the better it will be for the East-ender." " But, my dear fellow," protested My Candid Friend, impatiently rapping his knuckles on the table. " Look at what is being done for the East-ender. Why, I read the other day " " What are you doing for him ? " " I ? " exclaimed My Candid Friend, too astonished to say more " I ? " " Yes, you. The responsibility for the East-ender's unhappy lot lies at your door. Your insane scheming to get things cheap, your silly search after bargains " My Candid Friend winced : bargains are his particular weakness ; " follies of that kind keep your brothers and S 2 260 SEVEN YEARS' HARD sisters at deadly work for a deadly wage. The pot of jam you buy for sevenpence, and the bloater paste you buy for twopence " " / buy bloater paste ? 7 buy jam ? " cried My Candid Friend, rolling his eyes heavenwards and showing the whites. " Well, you eat 'em, and it comes to the same thing. In their cheapness lies the proof of your degeneracy. As a follower of Christ, have you done your best for His little ones ? Will you dare to say, ' I know not : am I my brother's keeper?' to the voice clamouring within you, ' Where is thy brother ? ' Say so, if you like ; but I tell you that your plea of ignorance or irresponsibility is the plea of a coward." " Stow it ! " cried My Candid Friend. " That's a bit too strong. Your cigar has gone out ; and, if you can't be a bit decent, I shall do the same." I struck another match, and puffed away for a minute or two. Then I said " Look here, old chap ! we'll drop recrimination, be- cause we're all in the same boat. Now, to get to the root of the matter, what was the Master's golden rule of conduct ? Was it, or was it not, ' Whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them ' ? If you were an East-ender, what would you want people to do for you ? Adopt the milk-sop policy of so many clergymen and women ? Give you a free tea occasion- ally ? Send you a ticket for soup, grocery, or coal ? By no manner of means. Why, you would want them to come and personally acquaint themselves with your work and your play, to take interest in your children and make the acquaintance of your wife. The problem of the East-ender's life is not going to be solved by ' other EPILOGUE 261 people ' that's what I want to say. Nothing but personal devotion will save him. We may try to shelve the responsibility on to public bodies ; we may hire all sorts of persons to do the work for us ; ultimately we shall have to assume the responsibility and do the work ourselves. To the fashionable woman, who ' really has no notion how the poor live ' ; to the successful mer- chant, who considers ' business ' a sufficient excuse for neglect ; to the artist, the poet, the politician, we have but one message : ' Your riches will be sanctified when enriching others ; your powers will be justified when working for others ; your future heaven will be assured when you have saved others from a present hell.' You've got to do the work yourself, my son." " I don't follow you, Free," objected My Candid Friend. " You are talking Greek. Hang it ! How can I do the work myself?" " By living with these people, and so making them realise the meaning of brotherhood." My Candid Friend sprang from his chair as if he had been shot. " Me ? " he screamed. " Me live in the East End ? " " And why not ? If I could convince you that we have infinitely more in common with the East-ender than you have ever suspected, I should have taken the first step towards reconciliation. I fail to see why, because you keep horses, and occupy a big house, and have a place in Surrey, you shouldn't pass some weeks of every year in the East End not as a professional philanthropist, mind you, but as a citizen." " Horses and carriages and all ? " " Horses and carriages and all." My Candid Friend chuckled. 262 SEVEN YEARS* HARD " You are thorough-going, at any rate," he said ; " but you seem to forget that there is such a thing as Society, that there is such a thing as class distinction. We West-enders have our duties to one another, you know." " As a Christian, I protest. You have no duties to the West End which you have not also to the East End. A Christianity of accepted separation is a contemptible sham. There's no sense in it ; there's no reason for it ; and it is fraught with the greatest possible danger to the commonwealth." In my excitement I put the lighted end of my cigar in my mouth. " What did you say ? " asked My Candid Friend, with the utmost calmness. " I was about to observe," I replied, carefully measur- ing my words, " that an illustration might help you to understand my meaning." " Thanks ! " murmured My Candid Friend, ungrate- fully. " To argue from analogy, then. It is but a few years since Suburbia was supposed to possess distinction only by virtue of its being within easy hail of Charing Cross. In those days it was pathetic to observe with what feverish anxiety the young Thompson-Browns sought to prove that their house was twenty-seven feet five inches within the four-mile radius. But the new genera- tion of Thompson-Browns don't care the toss of a button whether it is or not. Their suburb is the centre of a civic life of its own. They have their town hall and their theatre, their local charities and their local scandals. Suburbia is no longer outcast : it has found EPILOGUE 263 itself. And this is the point : don't smile so super- ciliously it has found itself in spite of the West End" "Oh, it has, has it?" "At present," I continued, ignoring the sarcasm, " ninety-nine Londoners out of a hundred regard the East End as socially impossible. This is the view even of those who ' work ' there. But, within the next few years, unless I am much mistaken, the East End will begin to show how possible it is. You West-enders who want to survive had better assist it in its evolution. It is not above desiring your help. In its poverty it calls to you rich ones for wealth ; in its greyness it looks to you brilliant ones for light. If * Society' turns a deaf ear to the East End, it will do so at its peril ; its very name will pass elsewhere." " Oh, its very name will pass elsewhere ! " echoed My Candid Friend. " My excellent lad, your wit is out, and so is your cigar." I threw the thing into the grate, and drew in my chair a couple of inches. My Candid Friend edged away. " Look here ! " I exclaimed ; and my voice grated on my own ear, so rasping it was. " Bear with me a moment ! We have cramped that majestic word with the shackles of conventionality. What is Society ? Are not this man and that, this woman and that, of one flesh and blood ? The hard-working dock-labourer and the hard-working Cabinet Minister, physician, merchant are not their aims, and even their methods, almost identical ? You speak of class distinctions ; you create an impassable gulf between East and West. Madness ! Madness, I say. The same sunshine is over all. God's 264 SEVEN YEARS' HARD breath is in all. We shall all die some day, sha'n't we?" "There is a popular impression to that effect," ad- mitted My Candid Friend. " And the popular impression is correct. The gorgeous lady who ogles, you from her corner in Regent Street, and the vulgar little trull who openly bids for your favour in the East India Road what difference is there between them ? Nay ! is there any fundamental dis- tinction between the elegant damsel sweeping along the Row in her carriage like a flash of well-bred sun- shine, and the Millwall factory-girl, rough of tongue and light of heart, just out from her pickling and rope- twisting and asbestos-making ? " " ' Nay ' is good," murmured My Candid Friend, as if considering a nice point ; " distinctly good. Much virtue in ' Nay ' ! " " Don't be a fool ! " I exclaimed, irritably. " Tell me what you really think." "I'll tell you what I really think, then," said My Candid Friend, suddenly waking up. " You are talking the most utter balderdash. You are giving expression to sentiments quite unworthy of your cloth. You are propounding a theory of society which, to say the least of it, is impossible of realisation. To speak frankly, I'm sick of the subject. It's East End East End East End, morning, noon, and night. Why the dickens don't you leave the East End alone ? Why don't you let it evolve itself? In my opinion it wants no help from any of us." " ' The eye cannot say unto the hand, I have no need of thee,' " I quoted ; " * nor, again, the head to the feet, I have no need of you And those members of the EPILOGUE 265 body which we think to be less honourable, upon these we bestow more abundant honour.' The mistake we have all made in the past is to think that one part of Society can do without another, forgetting that when one member suffers all the members suffer with it, that when one member is honoured all the members are honoured with it." "That's rational enough," exclaimed My Candid Friend. " Very well put ! But surely we may leave matters in the hands of those good people who are so nobly devoting themselves to the cause of the poor. The East End wants no interference from us, you under- stand us West-enders not directly, I mean." " Right ! And wrong ! " I answered. " It doesn't want your interference as individuals ; but it does want your interference as a part of Society. Nobody wants you to set up some little twopenny-halfpenny show of your own, and fall to banging the drum's hide in and whistling till you crack ; but what you and I and everybody have got to do is to put our shoulders to the wheel that's got stuck. Metaphor mixed ? Oh, well, never mind about that. The characteristic weakness of our philanthropy lies in its manifold mutually exclusive organisations. What is needed is a great scheme of co- operation. We of the Church of England must first set ourselves right, resolutely using the knife * to every malignant growth. Then, without sacrificing personal conviction, we must throw in our lot with all real effort real, mind you ! assuming, in our corporate capacity, the largest possible responsibilities, and resolutely quashing the solemn trifling of vain and ignorant persons. Could we cry an amnesty, and, ceasing to compete, work in accord for ten good years, what might not be accom- 266 SEVEN YEARS' HARD plished ! If we would save our religion from failure, and ourselves from everlasting dishonour, we must join hands, even at the eleventh hour, with whatsoever things are true, and honest, and just, and pure, and lovely, and of good report, no matter from what direc- tion they come, or by what shibboleth of separation they may be called." For the first time My Candid Friend seemed interested. "Well," he said, "and what would this wonderful combination of forces effect ? " " Everything ! Valleys of misunderstanding would be exalted ; mountains of difficulty would be laid low. The crooked would be made straight, the rough places plain ; and the glory of the Lord would be revealed." " I wish you wouldn't quote so much," objected My Candid Friend. " Tell me in plain English what you mean." " I mean," I answered, putting the brake on, as it were, " that the East End, under such a scheme, would be a cleaner, comelier, and kinder place all round. The streets would be scrupulously clean, the drains absolutely sweet. No refuse of shop or smoke of factory would be permitted to pollute the air. The houses would be well built and commodious ; and for each there would be a garden in front, or at back, or on the roof. In the streets there would be shady resting-places, where the old might meditate and doze ; and enclosed spaces, furnished with sand-heaps and gymnasia, where the young might play. And everywhere would be fountains of living water for the refreshment of the body and the delight of the eye, and public gardens bright with flowers and comforting with greenth of grass ; and the .EPILOGUE 267 air would be sweet-smelling, as the Lord God made it, and not stinking with corruption, as man has made it. All the roadways would be direct enough for lightning- swift transit to and from the centre of London and the noble monuments of our national greatness, and broad enough for the quickly changing conditions of life. And here and there and everywhere, as these mighty tho- roughfares branched away, octopus-like, into the far distance, would be vast stretches of moor and forest, of hill and dale, in all their natural beauty ; and the niggardly philanthropy which satisfies itself with the conversion of a smelly churchyard or two, would be swept away before the wider recognition of human claims. In that day the worker will be honoured for his toil, and not despised ; and he will have scope for individuality, and space for recreation of body and mind ; and wisdom will be his to exercise the one discreetly and to fill the other worthily. In that day his employer will trust him, and will deem it no small privilege to lead him upwards and onwards, by means of books and pictures and music and dancing and the drama ; and the em- ployer's reward will be found in the more fervent zeal and larger usefulness of his servant." " And the inspiration for all this ? " asked My Candid Friend. "The life of the Master. For Christians and non- Christians alike, there could be no better means of keep- ing the heart strong and tender, the affections pure, and the aim worthy, than daily contact with Jesus of Nazareth. When the kingdoms of this world, with its councils and parliaments, its boards and committees, its wharves and its workshops, its schools and its universities, its nurseries 268 SEVEN YEARS 1 HARD and its drawing-rooms, have become the kingdoms of our God, then Christ the Emancipator shall reign in London even as He reigns in heaven." " More quotations ! " grumbled My Candid Friend. "Yet," he added, under his breath, "it is a noble dream." "It will be a nobler reality," said I. THE END R. CLAY AND SONS, LTD., BREAD STREET HILL, B.C., AND BUNGAY, SUFFOLK. UNI VEKSm O* CALIFORNIA LIB* 30?n-6,'l4: YC 07422