Part 18 (1/2)

”These 30,000 are quite independent of the number of mere pauper children, who crowd the streets of Londen, and who never enter a school: but of these latter nothing will be said here.

”Now, what are the pursuits, the dwelling-houses, and the habits of these poor wretches? Of 1600, who were examined, 162 confessed that they had been in prison, not merely once, or even twice, but some of them several times; 116 had run away from their homes; 170 slept in the ”lodging-houses;” 253 had lived altogether by beggary; 216 had neither shoes nor stockings; 280 had no hat or cap, or covering for the head; 101 had no linen; 249 had never slept in a bed; many had no recollection of ever having been in a bed; 68 were the children of convicts,”--Vol. i. 394.

In the towns of the manufacturing districts there are, says the same author--

”A great number of cellars beneath the houses of the small shopkeepers and operatives, which are inhabited by crowds of poor inhabitants. Each of these cellar-houses contains at the most two, and often, and in some towns generally, only one room. These rooms measure in Liverpool, from 10 to 12 feet square. In some other towns, they are rather larger. They are generally flagged. The flags lie ”directly” upon the earth, and are generally wretchedly damp. In wet weather they are very often not dry for weeks together. Within a few feet of the windows of these cellars, rises the wall which keeps the street from falling in upon them, darkening the gloomy rooms, and preventing the sun's rays penetrating into them.

”Dr. Duncan, in describing the cellar-houses of the manufacturing districts, says[134]--'The cellars are ten or twelve feet square; generally flagged, but frequently having only the bare earth for a floor, and sometimes less than six feet in height. There is frequently no window, so that light and air can gain access to the cellar only by the door, the top of which is often not higher than the level of the street. In such cellars ventilation is out of the question. They, are of course dark; and from the defective drainage, they are also very generally damp. There is sometimes a back cellar, used as a sleeping apartment, having no direct communication with the external atmosphere, and deriving its scanty supply of light and air solely from the front apartment.'”--Vol. i. 447.

”One of the city missionaries, describing the state of the Mint district in the city of London, says, 'it is utterly impossible to describe the scenes, which are to be witnessed here, or to set forth in its naked deformity the awful characters sin here a.s.sumes. * * *

_In Mint street, alone, there are nineteen lodging-houses._ The majority of these latter are awful sinks of iniquity, and are used as houses of accommodation. In some of them, both s.e.xes sleep together indiscriminately, and such acts are practised and witnessed, that married persons, who are in other respects awfully depraved, have been so shocked, as to be compelled to get up in the night and leave the house. Many of the half-naked impostors, who perambulate the streets of London in the daytime, and obtain a livelihood by their deceptions, after having thrown off their bandages, crutches, &c., may be found here in their true character; some regaling themselves in the most extravagant manner; others gambling or playing cards, while the worst of language proceeds from their lips. Quarrels and fights are very common, and the cry of murder is frequently heard.

The public-houses in this street are crowded to excess, especially, on the Sabbath evening.[135]

”In the police reports published in the _Sun_ newspaper of the 11th of October, 1849, the following account is given of '_a penny lodging-house_' in Blue Anchor Yard, Rosemary Lane. One of the policemen examined, thus describes a room in this lodging- house:--'It was a very small one, extremely filthy, and there was no furniture of any description in it. _There were sixteen men, women, and children lying on the floor, without covering. Some of them were half naked._ For this miserable shelter, each lodger paid a penny.

The stench was intolerable, and the place had not been cleaned out for some time.'

”If the nightly inmates of these dens are added to the tramps who seek lodging in the vagrant-wards of the workhouses, we shall find that there are at least between 40,000 and 50,000 tramps who are daily infesting our roads and streets!”--Vol. i. 431.

In the agricultural districts, whole families, husbands and wives, sons and daughters, sisters-in-law and brothers-in-law, sleep together, and here we find a source of extraordinary immorality. ”The accounts we receive,” says Mr. Kay--

”From all parts of the country show that these miserable cottages are crowded to an extreme, and that the crowding is progressively increasing. People of both s.e.xes, and of all ages, both married and unmarried--parents, brothers, sisters, and strangers--sleep in the same rooms and often in the same beds. One gentleman tells us of six people of different s.e.xes and ages, two of whom were man and wife, sleeping in the same bed, three with their heads at the top and three with their heads at the foot of the bed. Another tells us of adult uncles and nieces sleeping in the same room close to each other; another of the uncles and nieces sleeping in the same bed together; another of adult brothers, and sisters sleeping in the same room with a brother and his wife just married; many tell us of adult brothers and sisters sleeping in the same beds; another tells us of rooms so filled with beds that there is no s.p.a.ce between them, but that brothers, sisters, and parents crawl over each other half naked in order to get to their respective resting-places; another of its being common for men and women, not being relations, to undress together in the same room, without any feeling of its being indelicate; another of cases where women have been delivered in bed-rooms crowded with men, young women, and children; and others mention facts of these crowded bed-rooms much too horrible to be alluded to. Nor are these solitary instances, but similar reports are given by gentlemen writing in ALL parts of the country.

”The miserable character of the houses of our peasantry, is, of itself, and independently of the causes which have made the houses so wretched, degrading and demoralising the poor of our rural districts in a fearful manner. It stimulates the unhealthy and unnatural increase of population. The young peasants from their earliest years are accustomed to sleep in the same bed-rooms with people of both s.e.xes, and with both married and unmarried persons. They therefore lose all sense of the indelicacy of such a life. They know, too, that they can gain nothing by deferring their marriages and by saving; that it is impossible for them to obtain better houses by so doing; and that in many cases they must wait many years before they could obtain a separate house of any sort. They feel that if they defer their marriage for ten or fifteen years, they will be at the end of that period in just the same position as before, and no better off for their waiting. Having then lost all hope of any improvement of their social situation, and all sense of the indelicacy of taking a wife home to the bedroom already occupied by parents, brothers, and sisters, they marry early in life,--often, if not generally, before the age of twenty,--and very often occupy, for the first part of their married life, another bed in the already crowded sleeping-room of their parents! In this way the morality of the peasants is destroyed; the numbers of this degraded population are unnaturally increased, and their means of subsistence are diminished by the increasing compet.i.tion of their increasing numbers.”--Vol. i. 472.

A necessary consequence of this demoralization is that infanticide prevails to a degree unknown in any other part of the civilized world.

The London _Leader_ informs its readers that upon a recent occasion--

”It was declared by the coroner of Leeds, and a.s.sented to as probable by the surgeon, that there were, as near as could be calculated, about three hundred children put to death yearly in Leeds alone that were not registered by the law. In other words, three hundred infants were murdered to avoid the consequences of their living, and these murders, as the coroner said, are never detected.”

The reader may now advantageously turn to the account of the state of education in Leeds, already given,[136] with a view to ascertain the intellectual condition of the women guilty of the foul and unnatural crime of child-murder. Doing so, he will find that out of eighteen hundred and fifty that were married there were _one thousand and twenty who could not sign their names_--and this in the centre of civilization in the middle of the nineteenth century!

But a short time since, the _Morning Chronicle_ gave its readers a list of twenty-two trials, for child-murder alone, that had been _reported_ in its columns, and these were stated to be but one-half of those that had taken place in the short period of twenty-seven days!

On the same occasion it stated that although English ruffianism had ”not taken to the knife,” it had

”Advanced in the devilish accomplishment of biting off noses and scooping out eyes. Kicking a man to death while he is down,” it continued, ”or treating, a wife in the same way--stamping on an enemy or a paramour with hobnailed boots--smas.h.i.+ng a woman's head with a hand-iron--these atrocities, which are of almost daily occurrence in our cities, are not so much imputed crimes as they are the extravagant exaggerations of the coa.r.s.e, brutal, sullen temper of an Englishman, brutified by ignorance and stupefied by drink.”

On the same occasion the _Chronicle_ stated that in villages few young people of the present day marry until, as the phrase is, it has ”become necessary.” It is, it continued, the rural practice to ”keep company in a very loose sense, till a cradle is as necessary as a ring.” On another, and quite recent occasion, the same journal furnished its readers with the following striking ill.u.s.tration of the state of morals:--

”In one of the recent Dorsets.h.i.+re cases, [of child murder,] common cause was made by the girls of the county. They attended the trial in large numbers; and we are informed that on the acquittal of the prisoner a general expression of delight was perceptible in the court; and they left the a.s.sizes town boasting 'that they might now do as they liked.' We are then, it seems, with all our boasted civilization, relapsing into a barbarous and savage state of society.”

Lest it might be supposed that this condition of things had been inherited, the editor stated that--

”This deplorable state of morals was of comparatively recent growth.

Old people,” he continued, ”can often tell the year when the first of such cases occurred in their families; and what a sensation of shame it then excited; while they will also tell us that the difficulty now is to find a lowly couple in village life with whom the rule of decency and Christianity is not the exception. It is a disgraceful fact--and one which education, and especially religious education, has to account for--that a state of morals has grown up in which it can no longer be said that our maidens are given in marriage.”

Infanticide is not, however, confined to the unmarried. Burial clubs abound. ”In our large provincial towns,” says Mr. Kay--