PASSING. BY WILLIAM TOYNBEE. THROUGH the dark valley thou wilt pass to-night; A heart no longer scathed by Sorrow's scars, -Murray's Magazine. ' THE PROBLEM OF THE SLUMS. men-to bridge over this gulf between wealth and destitution. We have come to realize that to deal with the problem of poverty is one of the highest duties owing to our common humanity, and we have addressed ourselves to the task in a multiplicity of ways. There is no brighter page in our history than the efforts which charity and liberality have put forth in the cause of suffering and degraded humanity THE century was still in its earliest years when Robert Owen put forward his schemes for the amelioration of the condition of the very poorest and the rescue of the destitute; and its closing decade finds us still engaged in projects with the same end in view, and, we are sorry to say, with not much higher hopes of ultimate success than those with which we started. But if research for that philosopher's stone of modern times, a panacea for poverty, has fortunes sacrificed, devoted lives spent made little progress in the century, pov- in the work, noble examples of zeal and erty itself has not been standing still. Its love manifested without number. The increase has been in an appallingly high bare enumeration of workers and their proportion to progress in every other de- efforts would occupy volumes. But where partment of the national life. are the results ? When we look to the slums of our great cities to London, to Liverpool, or to Glasgow-we may well. ask the question. That there has been good work done we know from many quarters; but when we look at what there is still to do, we have to confess in despair. that our achievements are but as drops in the bucket. The hideous mass of poverty, vice, and crime still remains apparently impregnable in our midst, and we can scarcely say that we have carried even its outworks. To endeavor to storm its citadel seems indeed a forlorn hope. Fast as wealth, commerce, and industry have increased among us, poverty and destitution have kept pace with them. An attendant poverty is the penalty of a high civilization, and the depth of the one seems to bear an inverse ratio to the height of the other. In our great centres the extremes of wealth and poverty are drawn together in the closest juxtaposition, as if by the irony of natural law. "Darkest England" is conterminous with Brightest England, and yet they stand at opposite and remote poles. We may honestly claim that there has been a growing desire throughout the present century-a desire increasing as the ter. rible realities of the confronting evil are more and more forcibly brought home to This, however, is the work for which General Booth has volunteered; and his offer to undertake a duty which is daily being more and more felt to be the urgent necessity of the age must call forth our hearty admiration. The undertaking, as we have said, is of the nature of a forlornhope, and as such entitled to the sympathy due to such enterprises. Since Robert Owen's time, no Englishman has come forward with such a bold proposal, promising in its realization-even in its partial success -so widespread and beneficial results; and the courage and self-confidence which have made General Booth stand to the front, are qualities that will stand him in good stead in the desperate struggle in which he proposes to engage. He may go down in the conflict, but the world will even then be the gainer, as it was in the case of Owen before him. From Owen's failure we learned the valuable lessons of co-operation, and infant education, and shorter hours of factory labor. If, contrary to our best wishes, General Booth's schemes should fall short of realization, we shall doubtless gather from them experiences not less valuable for use in a contest that will go on to the end of time. The Scriptural assurance that we shall have the poor always with us lies beyond the possibility of scepticism. Any discussion of "Darkest England and the Way out of it" must necessarily begin with a consideration of the capabilities of the man who has undertaken to show us the way. General Booth has the advantage of being a public character of note. He is the author and manager of the religious organization known as the Salvation Army, which for five-and-twenty years has been working in our midst, and which has specially devoted its energies to the rescue of the destitute and the fallen. We gather from its statistics that last October the Army numbered 9416 persons wholly engaged in its work, 4506 of these being in the United Kingdom: the rest are scattered over the Continent, the Colonies, and India. It holds invested property amounting to £644,618, of which £377,500 is held in this country; and in addition, it owns plant and stock amounting to £130,000 additional. General Booth's organization is thus what in the language of trade would be called a "going concern ;" and the fact that it is his own creation, and its success due to his own ability and exertions, takes away from him any charge of presumptuousness or overconfidence in coming forward as he has done just now. Practically he has got his business started already; what he wants is the means of extending his plant and machinery, to enable it to meet the work which he has ready to haud. We But if the Salvation Army, already working heartily and successfully, be an advantage to General Booth at the outset of his scheme, we must admit that it is not without drawbacks which it requires a considerable exertion of Christian charity and liberality upon the part of the great najority of those who are now giving him their hearty support, to overlook. cannot profess an intimate acquaintance with the theology which obtains in the Salvation Army. We fear that at the best it is but a rudimentary and imperfect form of Christianity. We know its ritual to be. vulgar, noisy, and ludicrous—that to devout and cultured minds it must even seemn irreverent and blasphemous. General Booth will triumphantly point to the fact. that it has made pious and decent men out of the godless offscourings of the streets, and the argument is a strong one. It is, however, a dangerous admission to allow that there may be one religion for the wealthy and educated and another for the ignorant and destitute; and had we had our choice we should have preferred to see the work carried on under more orthodox auspices. The time, however, is not one for hair-splitting. General Booth and his Salvationists have taken their stand in the gap; and their position constitutes their best claim to cordial support, and forbids too critical an examination of their weapons. While it is a striking proof of the liberality of the age that so many of our most prominent religious leaders, from the Archbishop of Canterbury and Cardinal Manning downward, have expressed sympathy with General Booth's aims, we can readily understand that the Church and even dissenting bodies feel compelled to maintain a certain amount of reservc. The Church especially, naturally enough feels that General Booth's position implies a deficiency in its own exertions, and a consequent reproach. We do not so consider it. Whatever blame attaches to the Church rests upon the past-upon the last century especially, and upon a considerable portion of this. Had the Church then done her duty, while destitution in our great cities could still be grappled with, she might have been able to do much to stem the tide of poverty and vice; but the time was allowed to pass until a 66 Darkest London' had sprung up far beyond the powers of either the Church or the poorlaws to deal with. During the last forty years she has been making zealous efforts to amend her fault, and no reflections need rest upon the energies which she is now putting out to reclaim the masses in the slums. Many other denominations are pushing rescue work with equal zeal, but both the workers and the means at their disposal are insignificant compared with the work that has to be done. least touched the national conscience. And compunction has been by no means quick in coming. We might almost put in parallel columns against General Booth's pages the following description of the London sluins nearly a hundred and fifty years ago which Henry Fielding drew, not from his imagination as a novelist, but from his experiences as a police magistrate: "If we were to make a progress through the outskirts of the metropolis, and look for the habitations of the poor, we should there be It might, however, be said, What special hold such pictures of human misery as must claim has General Booth to come forward and ask public assistance for a work which is quite as sedulously being carried on by numerous other religious agencies in the slums of our great cities? General Booth's chief advantage, as it seems to us, consists in the fact that his organization is designed solely for dealing with the poor. As we understand General Booth's explanation of his position, it is for the poor and the vicious alone that his organization is worked. The Churches, on the other hand, have their energies directed to all classes of the community, and could not devote themselves exclusively to one par. ticular section without a chance of injury to the rest. Important as is the place held by the poor in Christian doctrine, they are not its only object. But General Booth's organization has been specially formed for laboring among social outcasts, with a recognition of their special need of rescue, and leaves the Churches to aid in the work on their own lines, and according to their abilities. It is as a special scheme to meet a special and dangerous evil that General Booth's proposals particularly recommend themselves to our attention. We shall take as read General Booth's exposition of the miseries of metropolitan destitution, with the sufferings of the various classes who swell its ranks. With these the public are already painfully familiar. The slums have long been the happy hunting-ground of the writer in search of a sensation-where squalor, vice, and misery supply all the elements of repulsive horror without effort of imagination on the reporter's part. The daily papers have made us perfectly familiar with such painful scenes as General Booth describes in his work, if indeed they have not made us case-hardened. If General Booth has done no other service, he has at move the compassion of every heart that deserves the name of human. What, indeed, must be his composition who could see whole families in want of every necessary of life, oppressed with hunger, cold, nakedness, and filth, and with diseases the certain consequences of all these? The sufferings, indeed, of the poor are less known than their misdeeds; and therefore we are less apt to pity them. They starve and freeze and rot among themselves, but they beg and steal and rob among their betters. There is not a parish in the liberty of Westminster which doth not swarm all day with beggars, and all night with thieves."* This condition of the slums, limited as it must seem to our eyes to have been in Fielding's days, and therefore the more easily to be effectually dealt with, has been allowed to go on until in the present day we find ourselves face to face with a "submerged tenth." If we allow another century and a half to elapse without some determined attempt to grapple with the evil, heaven knows what proportion of the population may be under the wave by the time that General Booth's book comes to be exhumed as an antiquarian curiosity of social literature. The figures which General Booth puts forward as a basis of his estimate that a tenth part of our population are submerged by the wave of poverty, vice, and crime, are melancholy enough as regards London itself. The numbers are based on actual enumeration in the East End, and an approximate estimate for the rest of the metropolis. There are paupers, in asylums, workhouses, and hospitals, 51,000; homeless, loafers, casuals, and some criminals, 33,000; starving, casual earnings between 18s. a week and chronic want, 300,000. We do not follow him * A Proposal for making an Effectual Provision for the Poor, for amending their Morals, and for rendering them useful Members of Society 1755. Add to this the number of indoor paupers and lunatics (excluding criminals)-78,966-and we have an army of nearly two millions 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 classes immediately above the houseless and starving. This brings my total to three millions, or, to put it roughly, to one. tenth of the population.' It is obvious, however, that only sections. of the classes mentioned above can fall within the range of General Booth's scheme, and even then the residue which properly claims his ministrations is ghastly in its dimensions. Let us now examine the various methods by which General Booth proposes to make an impression upon the pauper-stricken and vicious masses which go to make up the population of "Darkest England," and consider how far experience and commonsense can be made to guarantee their success. And in this investigation we shall not confine ourselves merely to General Booth's plans, but shall endeavor to see where other responsibilities come in, and inquire whether the work could not indirectly be aided from other sources. Jndependence is one of the General's credit able failings; but it strikes us that his scheme would have all the more chance of success, the wider he can dig its foundations among the roots of law and society, and the more he can make his plans fit into the institutions of the State and the operations of other Christian and benevolent bodies. If we take, at the very outset, General Booth's own division of the denizens of Darkest England, we shall find that one class might very justly be set aside, leaving room for greater exertions among the more necessitous and desperate classes. We give the General's own words : "The denizens in Darkest England for whom I appeal are-(1) those who, having no capital or income of their own, would in a month be dead from sheer starvation were they exclusively dependent upon the money earned hy their own work; and (2) those who, by their utmost exertions, are unable to attain the regulation allowance of food which the law prescribes as indispensable, even for the worst criminals in our jails." This will at once strike the reader as being a very incomplete classification, and he will not be surprised to find that the greater part of the General's book is devoted to cases which do not properly come under one or the other of these categories, as they leave out, or ought to leave out, those whose destitution is the result of idleness, intemperance, or crime. But to revert to General Booth's own division, his first class, those in danger of starvation from want of capital or work, have a special claim to our attention. Among them must be many-let us hope the greater number-who have not yet got the franchise of Darkest England. Either by poverty or by misfortune they stand on its brink, and it ought to be the object of all benevolent efforts of all the Churches, of . the charities, of the thousands of zealous workers among the poor, to save this class from being submerged. Even if these were unequal to the task, there is the poor-law, which ought to relieve General Booth of this care. They cannot earn a livelihood by work if they had it; therefore they are, failing charity, the proper care of the State. Roughly we may say the same of General Booth's second class but his definition is so loose that it is difficult to say precisely the particular treatment that would be most applicable to it. It is only when he comes to deal with particular divisions and particular cases that General Booth makes clear the sections of Daiker England which he proposes to deal with. Exclusiveness rather than comprehensiveness should be the aim of General Booth in fixing the limits of his relief scheme-we are speaking of practical relief, not of religious rescue-but his plans will be subjected to a very severe strain at the outset by the wideness of the scope which he proposes to give them. A large proportion of the sections which he proposes to bring within his plans might be left with safety to charity and to the poorlaws, provided that both were properly administered. But General Booth ignores other charitable operations than his own, and denounces the poor-laws, which is very much to be regretted, as he would find most valuable auxiliaries in both. That the poor-laws are not of themselves sufficient to relieve the misery of the London slums, we know; that they might be advantageously amended, we can easily gather from General Booth's experiences. We have already quoted his statement that 870,000 persons in receipt of outdoor relief were practically homeless and starving -a charge so serious that we trust it will receive the special attention of the Local Government Board. "' in return The first descent into Darkest London is through the Casual Ward, to which sensational journalists have vied with cach other in giving an evil reputation. That it is unpopular with the poor, the numbers who prefer the streets to its shelter is sufficient proof. The "casual, for his shelter for the night, his supper and breakfast, has a certain amount of work to do, which involves his remaining one whole day and two nights. This work is complained of as excessive, the food is merely a starvation regimen, and, what is 66 perhaps worst of all, the man being shut up all day has no chance of looking for work. We can scarcely combine a benevolent philanthropy with that strict administration of the law which is due to the ratepayers. But as the casual ward is the first entrance in many cases into the city dolent," it is a focus round which many benevolent efforts should be concentrated to save unfortunates from going farther, and if possible to turn them into the ways of honest livelihood. If the work described is excessive-if the rules throw undue obstacles in the way of the relieved getting work-we may justly call for amendment. We might go a step farther, and urge that an effort should be made to discriminate between worthless and hopelessly chronic "casuals" and "casuals' who had some chance of doing well, and treating them accordingly. As the casual ward is the first gate into Darkest London, so General Booth's "shelter" is the first exit from it in his plan. "Suppose that you are a casual in the streets of London, homeless, friendless, weary with looking for work all day and finding go? You have perhaps only a few coppers, or none. Night comes on. Where are you to it may be a few shillings, left of the rapidly dwindling store of your little capital. You shrink from sleeping in the open air; you equally shrink from going to the four penny doss-house, where, in the midst of strange and nant of the money still in your possession. ribald company, you may be robbed of the remWhile at a loss as to what to do, some one who sees you suggests that you should go to our shelter. You cannot, of course, go to the casual ward of the workhouse as long as you have any money in your possession. You come along to one of our shelters. On entering, you pay fourpence, and are free of the establishment for the night. You can come in early or late. The company begins to assem In ble about five o'clock in the afternoon. the women's shelter, you find that many come much earlier, and sit sewing, reading, and chatting in the sparely furnished but wellwarmed room from the early hours of the afternoon until bedtime. You come in, and you get a large pot of coffee, tea, or cocoa, and a hunk of bread. You can go into the washhouse, where you can have a wash with plenty of warm water, and soap and towels free. Then, after having washed and eaten, you can make yourself comfortable. You can write letters to your friends, if you have any friends to write to, or you can read, or you can sit quietly and do nothing. At eight o'clock the shelter is tolerably full, and then begins what we consider to be the indispensable feature of the whole concern. Two or three hundred men in the men's shelter, or as many women in the women's shelter, are collected together, |