Man was once a bird, and he is now an insect. In the
early, free, nomadic days, while as yet cities were not, he roamed at
will over the world; civilisation has clipped his wings. The
nineteenth-century man burrows in crowded homes, and crawls through
narrow streets.
Whether this constant "congestion to the metropolis,"
so characteristic of our modern times, is an inevitable accompaniment of
civilisation, and whether the advantages gained by it overbalance the
evils which it certainly occasions, we need not too carefully inquire.
Much might, probably, be said on both sides—as the kindly knight of
Queen Anne's reign loved to remark, with the leisurely good nature that
belonged to his age. It does certainly seem as if our countrymen
generally, until the last few years, had been forgetting the one half of
the great primal command, to "multiply and replenish the
earth." They have multiplied, in millions, but they did not even
think of replenishing the earth, whose huge continents stretch around
us, with fat harvests sleeping in their unwrought and unbroken soils.
The waste lands far away have been crying out for the advent of their
long-expected master, "to till the earth and subdue it;" and meanwhile,
whole generations have, in our own country, been crowding into
existence, and fighting for room to live in their narrow natal spot. The
truths which Malthus pointed out fifty years ago, as to the inevitable
tendency of population to outgrow the means of subsistence, should have
had a more important practical result than a barren and useless
controversy as to whether men should, in these days, continue to obey
the fundamental laws of their nature. Men had split up God's
commandment, and had forgot to replenish the earth; and finding,
as they generally find, that such a proceeding did not work well, and
that the truncated ordinance of their Creator avenged itself upon them
in famine and penury, they took counsel of the philosophers. The
philosophers, having ripely and well considered the matter, and judging
truly that vast mischiefs were sure to arise from the continuance of the
present state of things, advised mankind, not to obey the whole
command, but rather to leave off complying with that other portion of it
which they had hitherto obeyed. So that great and good man, Dr Chalmers,
writes a book of Political Economy, in which he eloquently urges the
raising of the moral character of the people, and the disseminating of
the truths of the gospel, as a means—to what?—to diminishing reckless
marriages, and improvident increase of the population. So Mr John Stuart
Mill, in his late work "On Liberty," makes it one of the few exceptions
to toleration for which he is willing to find room, that penal or
repressive measures may be used to prevent rash men burdening the
country with too many hungry mouths. The precepts of the philosophers
have turned out to be futile; and it might have been foreseen that they
would. The Creator has too well "laid the deep foundations" of the
social system in the complex nature of man, to allow of its being
appreciably affected by the apparent demonstrations of prudential
calculators. The true remedy for over-population was too obvious for
wise men to look at; but it has forced itself upon the attention of all.
Emigration is the great national fact and social blessing of our
day. The wastes of the world are being occupied. The surplus of our home
population flows continually away. The choking reservoirs of
civilisation are broken up, and humanity flows down to find its natural
level over innumerable plains. Our country has already felt the benefit
largely. Men stand more in open rank; there is more leisure for the
brain to work, and more room for the heart to play.
Yet the poor shall never cease out of the land ! The
curse of labour yet remains, and in an old country it assumes various
peculiarities of aggravation ; and along with it comes that greater
curse, of want of labour, and of want of courage and of will to
accept the labour when it is offered. Emigration cannot do everything,
and it seems powerless to meet the modern tendency of men to mass
themselves together into overgrown towns. There is still too great a
crowd of men in our land; but in the large cities there is a frightful
crush. The congestion of the country has been partially met: the
congestion of the city remains in all its aggravation, and will remain,
at least during our age and generation. We may hold that it is an unwise
and unnatural centralisation, and that men are bound to follow the
example of the first family from which they spring, and flow outwards in
all directions, instead of strangling each other in these jungles of
close and crowded life. All this may be, but the fact remains the same.
The causes which influence the enormous and apoplectic growth of large
cities, are too secret for us to unravel, and too powerful for us to
meet. We must accept cities and city life as a fact—the great and
momentous, if we may not even say appalling fact, of our age.
The colossal work of Mr Mayhew, on "London Labour and
the London Poor," will remain a wonderful monument of the dark side of
the nineteenth century, in the biggest town of the world.
"How poor, how rich, how abject, how august,
How complicate, how wonderful,"
is London! But the same feeling of the immense
needs, and sorrows, and sins of "that great city," comes back upon us
with perhaps as much force, though indirectly, when we are contemplating
the remedial measures that have been tried. The light falling here and
there makes the mass of darkness visible. There are no less than five
hundred and thirty charitable societies in London alone, and nearly
£2,000,000 of money is annually spent by them: while some persons have
attempted to calculate the amount of alms bestowed altogether as not
less than £3,500,000 annually. Year by year, the gulf steadily sucks
into it these enormous sums, yet, like Bun-yan's Slough of Despond, it
appears not much better. A very fair index of the amount of poverty in
the whole mass may be found in the statistics of the Refuges for the
houseless, which meet the wretched at the lowest and last point of
destitution, and catch them as they are just slipping over the verge of
ruin, In the Field-Lane Refuge alone, during the year before last,
upwards of twelve thousand persons received shelter and relief, not a
few of whom were thus saved from death by mere starvation. Since the
opening of the Asylum in Playhouse Yard, in 1820, one hundred and fifty
thousand men, women, and children, have been received within its walls.
Nor are these results so strange when we consider, that besides the
hundreds who are daily drifting into homelessness, there are no fewer
than fifty thousand whose homes are in the streets — the nomadic race of
London, "distinguished, like all other nomads," as their historian, Mr
Mayhew, informs us, "for their high cheek-bones and protruding jaws, for
their use of a slang language, for their lax ideas of property, for
their general improvidence, their repugnance to continuous labour, their
disregard of female honour, their love of cruelty, their pugnacity, and
their utter want of religion." It is one of the chief recommendations of
these Refuges, as they are conducted in London, that besides saving many
nightly from starvation, they seem often to inspire in the minds of
those whom they temporarily receive, the courage to " breast the blows
of circumstance," and try the fate of life once more. During twelve
months in the recent history of one of the institutions above mentioned,
no fewer than twelve hundred of those received into it from street
life,—that is, from extreme poverty and profligate vagabondism,—were
placed in positions of independence, and enabled to work and live by
their work. But a source which fills such institutions with still more
painful cases of destitution, is that standing evil of underpaid
solitary labour, especially of slop-workers and needle-women. Political
economy, indeed, tells us that this is an evil which no partial or
eleemosynary efforts can ever meet, and it doubtless demands both
preventive and remedial measures. Neither of them will do alone. "
Emigration " and " employment of women" must occupy the attention of
thinkers and of statesmen; for thus alone can we hope to see the bitter
waters gradually drained away. But, meanwhile, while they are laying
their plans, human bodies and souls are perishing, and the grinding
wheels move on relentlessly. The evil is so great as to call for more
immediate remedies than the doctrines of free trade embrace, lest the
modern, like the mystic Babylon, be judged as trading in all kinds of
merchandise, " and souls of men." At a meeting held in London some years
ago, about a thousand female slop-workers attended, and of these 5 only
had earned above 6s. a-week; 28 had earned 5s.; 13, 4s. 6d.; 142, 3s.;
150, 2s. 6d.; 71, 2s.; 82, 1s. 6d.; 98, only 1s. a-week!
Eighty-eight of these last stated they were entirely dependent on their
own exertions for support; 92 had earned under 1s.; and 223 had no work
at all during the whole of the week ! Facts like these, while they would
almost sanction any legislative interference, to secure a fair day's
wage for a fair day's work, (provided only that a means could be found
by which such interference should not become nugatory,) call at least
unmistakeably for individual and collective benevolence.
Another well-tried and fully-proved institution in
our large towns is that of the City Missionary, and in the clear and
most interesting narrative entitled "The Missing Link," we have an
important modification of this proposed, which certainly seems to have
been surprisingly successful, so far as it has been tried. It is urged,
in the first place, that the agency employed for such work should be
women. "The woman is appointed for the physical civilisation of
communities," and the moral amelioration is most hopeful which is
received in connexion with help and teaching as to the things of this
world. But the female agency which has been found most valuable is that
of reliable Christian women drawn from the same class of society as
those among whom they labour; and various good reasons are assigned for
this. This "native female agency" of ble-women, who have a
knowledge of the necessities of those among whom they labour, has
already proved itself to be acceptable to the poor. Working-men do not
complain of them in the grumbling tone which they are apt to assume
towards City Missionaries and Scripture-readers, who come about their
houses. "They have always met with a genuine welcome from the Lower
House of Lords, who know that their wives want teaching in the common
arts of life, and that even their own comfort depends upon the lesson
being learned." "She may point them to their forgotten duties, or to
acts which they never saw to be duties—may shew them how their children
look when they are clean; may teach them the use of soap; instruct them
in the preparation of food; get their windows opened, and their floors
purified; teach them the comfort of clean linen and clean beds; and
bring them eventually, 'clothed and in their right mind,' to sit at the
feet of all and any who may be in any degree the 'ministers of Christ.'"
About the best example of what a fraternal pen calls this " gospel of
the scrubbing-brush," this " evangel of saucepans, and fresh clean beds,
and tidy gowns, which tends onwards to the washing of the soul in the
laver of regeneration," is to be found in Mrs Bayly's little book on
"Ragged Homes, and How to Mend them;" and the
same sort of results which are there recorded as having sprung from the
exertions of one lady, have been multiplied wonderfully by the
wisely-chosen and well-worked agency the operations of which "The
Missing Link " professes to record. We must agree with the able and
excellent authoress of this work, "that it certainly seems that a
native female agency, drawn from the classes we want to serve and
instruct, has hitherto been a missing link, and that such a
supplementary work might now perfect the heavenly chain which shall lift
the lost and reckless from the depths of their despair."
Yet, after we have read the book, the conviction
recurs that, while the plan is good, and it is surprising it has not
been tried before, it will still be dependent for its efficiency on
having the right sort of people to work it—episcopai like L. N.
R., and agents like "Marian." "The spirit of the living creature
must be in the wheels." Without zeal and love, fed and sustained from an
adequate Source, this, and all other links, by which we attempt to bind
together the framework of society, will form but a rope of sand.
"The Missing Link" is a hopeful and practical book;
yet it is affecting to trace the dark shadows that lie upon the page.
One woman said to the "Bible-woman," "I tell you what it is: poverty is
a curse—a curse. It works all the good qualities out of you, and you
ponder, ponder; it takes all your thoughts to know how you are to get
bread." An old man, who was the fellow-lodger of one of the female
agents when she was a little girl, and who was kind-hearted, though an
atheist, had taught her to read a little, but bade her never read the
Bible— "it was full of lies: she had only to look round her in St
Giles's, and she might see that there was no God!" And even for those
who reject the lying lesson, and know that the darkness is but the
shadow of His holiness falling upon a sinful race, it is sad to watch
the double gloom resting upon young lives, where "the children of six
years old look like fifty, with their hunger-bitten faces—they are not
at play —they sit gazing out of the dark courts; and boys of
twelve, smoking short pipes, lie outside the doors." Many of the
incidents remind us forcibly of the thrilling narratives of Mr
Vanderkiste, in his "Dens of London;" a strong expression, but not too
strong for scenes such as that where he found a poor girl, seized with
malignant typhus fever, who "was but seventeen years of age when I found
her in this miserable abode, and during the delirium of fever she would
alternately sing hymns and utter pious expressions—the sunshine of her
life was then passing before her; afterwards in her delirium came the
storm of her life—abominable songs, wretched expressions, the thunder
and lightning of wickedness, such as she had sung and uttered in her
darkness." Narratives such as these are not written for those of whose
case they treat. They are written for those whose dwellings are fixed in
providence on the sunnier slope of life; who have round them a
sufficiency of temporal, and an affluence of spiritual blessings. They
who have got the birthright, and the mess of pottage too, are surely
bound, before all others, to hear that "exceeding loud and bitter cry"
that rises from the waste places of the earth, "Bless us, even us also,
O our Father!"