PAUPERS
Inmates of Workhouses,Asylums,and Hospitals .17,00034,00051,000HOMELESS
Loafers,Casuals,and some Criminals .11,00022,00033,000STARVING Casual earnings between 18s.per week and chronic want 100,000200,000300,000THE VERY POOR.
Intermittent earnings 18s.to 21s.per week .74,000148,000222,000Small regular earnings 18s.to 21s.per week .129,000258,000387,000.
331,000662,000993,000
Regular wages,artizans,etc.,22s.to 30s.per week .337,000Higher class labour,30s.to 50s.per week .121,000Lower middle class,shopkeepers,clerks,etc.34,000Upper middle class (servant keepers).45,000.
908,000
It may be admitted that East London affords an exceptionally bad district from which to generalise for the rest of the country.
Wages are higher in London than elsewhere,but so is rent,and the number of the homeless and starving is greater in the human warren at the East End.There are 31millions of people in Great Britain,exclusive of Ireland.If destitution existed everywhere in East London proportions,there would be 31times as many homeless and starving people as there are in the district round Bethnal Green.
But let us suppose that the East London rate is double the average for the rest of the country.That would bring out the following figures:
HOUSELESS
East London.United Kingdom.
Loafers,Casuals,and some Criminals 11,000165,500STARVING
Casual earnings or chronic want .100,0001,550,000Total Houseless and Starving .111,0001,715,500In Workhouses,Asylums,&c.17,000190,000.
128,0001,905,500
Of those returned as homeless and starving,870,000were in receipt of outdoor relief.To these must be added the inmates of our prisons.
In 1889174,779persons were received in the prisons,but the average number in prison at any one time did not exceed 60,000.The figures,as given in the Prison Returns,are as follows:--In Convict Prisons .11,600In Local Prisons.20,883In Reformatories.1,270In Industrial Schools .21,413Criminal Lunatics .910.
56,136
Add to this the number of indoor paupers and lunatics (excluding criminals)78,966--and we have an army of nearly two million:
belonging to the submerged classes.To this there must be added at the very least,another million,representing those dependent upon the criminal,lunatic and other classes,not enumerated here,and the more or less helpless of the class immediately above the houseless and starving.This brings my total to three millions,or,to put it roughly to one-tenth of the population.According to Lord Brabazon and Mr.Samuel Smith,"between two and three millions of our population are always pauperised and degraded."Mr.Chamberlain says there is a "population equal to that of the metropolis,--that is,between four and five millions--"which has remained constantly in a state of abject destitution and misery."Mr.Giffen is more moderate.
The submerged class,according to him,comprises one in five of manual labourers,six in 100of the population.Mr.Giffen does not add the third million which is living on the border line.
Between Mr Chamberlain's four millions and a half,and Mr.Giffen's 1,800,000I am content to take three millions as representing the total strength of the destitute army.
Darkest England,then,may be said to have a population about equal to that of Scotland.Three million men,women,and children a vast despairing multitude in a condition nominally free,but really enslaved;--these it is whom we have to save.
It is a large order.England emancipated her negroes sixty years ago,at a cost of #40,000,000,and has never ceased boasting about it since.
But at our own doors,from "Plymouth to Peterhead,"stretches this waste Continent of humanity--three million human beings who are enslaved--some of them to taskmasters as merciless as any West Indian overseer,all of them to destitution and despair?
Is anything to be done with them?Can anything be done for them?
Or is this million-headed mass to be regarded as offering a problem as insoluble as that of the London sewage,which,feculent and festering,swings heavily up and down the basin of the Thames with the ebb and flow of the tide?
This Submerged Tenth--is it,then,beyond the reach of the nine-tenths in the midst of whom they live,and around whose homes they rot and die?No doubt,in every large mass of human beings there will be some incurably diseased in morals and in body,some for whom nothing can be done,some of whom even the optimist must despair,and for whom he can prescribe nothing but the beneficently stern restraints of an asylum or a gaol.
But is not one in ten a proportion scandalously high?
The Israelites of old set apart one tribe in twelve to minister to the Lord in the service of the Temple;but must we doom one in ten of "God's Englishmen"to the service of the great Twin Devils--Destitution and Despair?
