As We Are and As We May Be - Walter Besant (most recommended books txt) 📗

parish is apparently of the same date, but the broad garden in which it formerly stood has been built over with mean tenement houses. Nothing is known about it; at present certain Roman Catholic sisters live in it, and carry on some kind of work.

The third great house is one of the few surviving specimens of the merchant's warehouse and residence in one. It is now an old and tumbledown place. Its ancient history I know not. What rich and costly bales were hoisted into this warehouse; what goods lay here waiting to be carried down the Stairs, and so on board ship in the Pool; what fortunes were made and lost here one knows not. Its ancient history is gone and lost, but it has a modern history. Here a certain man began, in a small way, a work which has grown to be great; here he spent and was spent; here he gave his life for the work, which was for the children of the poor. He was a young physician; he saw in this squalid and crowded neighbourhood the lives of the children needlessly sacrificed by the thousand for the want of a hospital; to be taken ill in the wretched room where the whole family lived was to die; the nearest hospital was two miles away. The young physician had but slender means, but he had a stout heart. He found this house empty, its rent a song. He took it, put in half a dozen beds, constituted himself the physician and his wife the nurse, and opened the Children's Hospital. Very soon the rooms became wards; the wards became crowded with children; the one nurse was multiplied by twenty; the one physician by six. Very soon, too, the physician lay upon his death-bed, killed by the work. But the Children's Hospital was founded, and now it stands, not far off, a stately building with one of its wards--the Heckford Ward--named after the physician who gave his own life to save the children. When the house ceased to be a hospital it was taken by a Mr. Dawson, who was the first to start here a club for the very rough lads. He, too, gave his life for the cause, for the illness which killed him was due to overwork and neglect. Devotion and death are therefore associated with this old house.

The fourth large house is now degraded to a common lodging-house. But it has still its fine old staircase.

The Parish of St. James's, Ratcliff, consists of an irregular patch of ground having the river on the south, and the Commercial Road, one of the great arteries of London, on the north. It contains about seven thousand people, of whom some three thousand are Irish Catholics. It includes a number of small, mean, and squalid streets; there is not anywhere in the great city a collection of streets smaller or meaner. The people live in tenement-houses, very often one family for every room--in one street, for instance, of fifty houses, there are one hundred and thirty families. The men are nearly all dock-labourers--the descendants of the scuffle-hunters, whose traditions still survive, perhaps, in an unconquerable hatred of government. The women and girls are shirt-makers, tailoresses, jam-makers, biscuit-makers, match-makers, and rope-makers.

In this parish the only gentlefolk are the clergy and the ladies working in the parish for the Church; there are no substantial shopkeepers, no private residents, no lawyer, no doctor, no professional people of any kind; there are thirty-six public-houses, or one to every hundred adults, so that if each spends on an average only two shillings a week, the weekly takings of each are ten pounds. Till lately there were forty-six, but ten have been suppressed; there are no places of public entertainment, there are no books, there are hardly any papers except some of those Irish papers whose continued sufferance gives the lie to their own everlasting charges of English tyranny. Most significant of all, there are no Dissenting chapels, with one remarkable exception. Fifteen chapels in the three parishes of Ratcliff, Shadwell, and St. George's have been closed during the last twenty years. Does this mean conversion to the Anglican Church? Not exactly; it means, first, that the people have become too poor to maintain a chapel, and next, that they have become too poor to think of religion. So long as an Englishman's head is above the grinding misery, he exercises, as he should, a free and independent choice of creeds, thereby vindicating and assorting his liberties. Here there is no chapel, therefore no one thinks; they lie like sheep; of death and its possibilities no one heeds; they live from day to day; when they are young they believe they will be always young; when they are old, so far as they know, they have been always old.

The people being such as they are--so poor, so hopeless, so ignorant--what is done for them? How are they helped upward? How are they driven, pushed, shoved, pulled, to prevent them from sinking still lower? For they are not at the lowest depths; they are not criminals; up to their lights they are honest; that poor fellow who stands with his hands ready--all he has got in the wide world--only his hands--no trade, no craft, no skill--will give you a good day's work if you engage him; he will not steal things; he will drink more than he should with the money you give him; he will knock his wife down if she angers him; but he is not a criminal. That step has yet to be taken; he will not take it; but his children may, and unless they are prevented they certainly will. For the London-born child very soon learns the meaning of the Easy Way and the Primrose Path. We have to do with the people ignorant, drunken, helpless, always at the point of destitution, their whole thoughts as much concentrated upon the difficulty of the daily bread as ever were those of their ancestor who roamed about the Middlesex Forest and hunted the bear with a club, and shot the wild goose with a flint-headed arrow.

First there is the Church work; that is to say, the various agencies and machinery directed by the Vicar. It may be new to some readers, especially to Americans, to learn how much of the time and thoughts of our Anglican beneficed clergymen are wanted for things not directly religious. The church, a plain and unpretending edifice, built in the year 1838, is served by the Vicar and two curates. There are daily services, and on Sundays an early celebration. The average attendance at the Sunday morning mid-day service is about one hundred; in the evening it is generally double that number. They are all adults. For the children another service is held in the Mission Room, The average attendance at the Sunday-schools and Bible-classes is about three hundred and fifty, and would be more if the Vicar had a larger staff of teachers, of whom, however, there are forty-two. The whole number of men and women engaged in organized work connected with the Church is about one hundred and twenty-six. Some of them are ladies from the other end of London, but most belong to the parish itself; in the choir, for instance, are found a barber, a postman, a caretaker, and one or two small shopkeepers, all living in the parish, When we remember that Ratcliff is not what is called a 'show' parish, that the newspapers never talk about it, and that rich people never hear of it, this indicates a very considerable support to Church work.

In addition to the church proper there is the 'Mission Chapel,' where other services are held. One day in the week there is a sale of clothes at very low prices. They are sold rather than given, because if the women have paid a few pence for them they are less willing to pawn them than if they had received them for nothing. In the Mission Chapel are held classes for young girls and services for children.

The churchyard, like so many of the London churchyards, has been converted into a recreation ground, where there are trees and flower-beds, and benches for old and young.

Outside the Church, but yet connected with it, there is, first, the Girls' Club. The girls of Ratcliff are all working-girls; as might be expected, a rough and wild company, as untrained as colts, yet open to kindly and considerate treatment. Their first yearning is for finery; give them a high hat with a flaring ostrich feather, a plush jacket, and a 'fringe,' and they are happy. There are seventy-five of these girls; they use their club every evening, and they have various classes, though it cannot be said that they are desirous of learning anything. Needlework, especially, they dislike; they dance, sing, have musical drill, and read a little. Five ladies who work for the church and for the club live in the club-house, and other ladies come to lend assistance. When we consider what the homes and the companions of these girls are, what kind of men will be their husbands, and that they are to become mothers of the next generation, it seems as if one could not possibly attempt a more useful achievement than their civilization. Above all, this club stands in the way of the greatest curse of East London--the boy and girl marriage. For the elder women there are Mothers' Meetings, at which two hundred attend every week; and there are branches of the Societies for Nursing and Helping Married Women. For general purposes there is a Parish Sick and Distress Fund; a fund for giving dinners to poor children; there is a frequent distribution of fruit, vegetables, and flowers, sent up by people from the country. And for the children there is a large room which they can use as a play-room from four o'clock till half-past seven. Here they are at least warm; were it not for this room they would have to run about the cold streets; here they have games and pictures and toys. In connection with the work for the girls, help is given by the Metropolitan Association for Befriending Young Servants, which takes charge of a good many of the girls.

For the men there is one of the institutions called a Tee-To-Tum Club, which has a grand cafe open to everybody all day long; the members manage the club themselves; they have a concert once a week, a dramatic performance once a week, a gymnastic display once a week; on Sunday they have a lecture or an address, with a discussion after it; and they have smaller clubs attached for football, cricket, rowing, and swimming.

For the younger lads there is another club, of one hundred and sixty members; they also have their gymnasium, their football, cricket, and swimming clubs; their classes for carpentry, wood-carving, singing, and shorthand; their savings' bank, their sick club, and their library.

Only the better class of lads belong to this club. But there is a lower set, those who lounge about the streets at night, and take to gambling and betting. For these boys the children's play-room is opened in the evening; here they read, talk, box, and play bagstelle, draughts, and dominoes, These lads are as rough as can be found, yet on the whole they give very little trouble.

Another important institution is the Country Holiday; this is accomplished by saving. It means, while it lasts, an expenditure of five shillings a week; sometimes the lads are taken to the seaside and live in a barn; sometimes the girls are sent to a village and placed about in cottages. A great number of the girls and lads go off every year a-hopping in Kent.

Add to these the temperance