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Page 32
Now I do not want to confuse my readers by taking first a bead-roll of
proposals, and then a bead-roll of arguments for and against, so I
shall deal with each reformer's idea in the order of its importance.
Before beginning, I must say that I differ from all the purveyors of
the cheaper sort of sentiment; I differ from many ladies and gentlemen
who talk about abstractions; and I differ most of all from the
feather-brained persons who set up as authorities after they have paid
flying visits in cabs to ugly neighbourhoods. When a specialist like
Miss Octavia Hill speaks, we hear her with respect; but Miss Hill is
not a sentimentalist; she is a keen, cool woman who has put her
emotions aside, and who has gone to work in the dark regions in a kind
of Napoleonic fashion. No fine phrases for her--nothing but fact,
fact, fact. Miss Hill feels quite as keenly as the gushing persons;
but she has regulated her feelings according to the environment in
which her energies had to be exercised, and she has done more good
than all the poetic creatures that ever raked up "cases" or made
pretty phrases. I leave Miss Hill out of my reckoning, and I deal with
the others. My conclusions may seem hard, and even cruel, but they are
based on what I believe to be the best kindness, and they are
supported by a somewhat varied experience. I shall waive the charge of
cruelty in advance, and proceed to plain downright business.
You want to clear away rookeries and erect decent dwellings in their
place? Good and beautiful! I sympathise with the intention, and I wish
that it could be carried into effect instantly. Unhappily reforms of
that sort cannot by any means be arranged on the instant, and
certainly they cannot be arranged so as to suit the case of the
Hopeless Poor. Shall I tell you, dear sentimentalist, that the
Hopeless brigade would not accept your kindness if they could? I shall
stagger many people when I say that the Hopeless division like the
free abominable life of the rookery, and that any kind of restraint
would only send them swarming off to some other centre from which they
would have to be dislodged by degrees according to the means and the
time of the authorities. Hard, is it not? But it is true. Certain
kinds of cultured men like the life which they call "Bohemian." The
Hopeless class like their peculiar Bohemianism, and they like it with
all the gusto and content of their cultured brethren. Suppose you
uproot a circle of rookeries. The inhabitants are scattered here and
there, and they proceed to gain their living by means which may or may
not be lawful. The decent law-abiding citizens who are turned out of
house and home during the progress of reform suffer most. They are not
inclined to become predatory animals; and, although they may have been
used to live according to a very low human standard, they cannot all
at once begin to live merely up to the standard of pigs. No writer
dare tell in our English tongue the consequences of evicting the
denizens of a genuine rookery for the purpose of substituting
improvements; and I know only one French writer who would be bold
enough to furnish cogent details to any civilised community. But, for
argument's sake, let me suppose that your "rooks" are transferred from
their nests to your model dwellings. I shall allow you to do all that
philanthropy can dictate; I shall grant you the utmost powers that a
government can bestow; and I shall give six months for your
experiment. What will be found at the end of that time? Alas, your
fine model dwellings will be in worse condition than the wigwam that
the Apache and his squaw inhabit! Let a colony of "rooks" take
possession of a sound, well-fitted building, and it will be found that
not even the most stringent daily visitation will prevent utter wreck
from being wrought. The pipes needed for all sanitary purposes will be
cut and sold; the handles of doors and the brass-work of taps will be
cut away; every scrap of wood-work available for fire-wood will be
stolen sooner or later, and the people will relapse steadily into a
state of filth and recklessness to be paralleled only among Australian
and North American aborigines. Which of the sentimentalists has ever
travelled to America with a few hundreds of Russian and Polish Jews,
Saxon peasants, and Irish peasants from the West? That is the only
experience capable of giving an idea of what happens when a
fairly-fitted house is handed over to the tender mercies of a
selection from the British "residuum." I shall be accused of talking
the language of despair. I have never done that. I should like to see
the time come when the poor may no more dwell in hovels like swine,
and when a poverty-stricken inhabitant of London may not be brought up
with ideas and habits coarser than those of a pig; I merely say that
shrieking, impetuous sentimentalists go to work in the wrong way. They
are the kind of people who would provide pigeon-cotes and dog-collars
for the use of ferrets. I grant that the condition of many London
streets is appalling; but make a house-to-house visitation, and see
how the desolation is caused. Wanton, brutish destructiveness has been
at work everywhere. The cistern which should supply a building cannot
be fed because the spring, the hinge, and the last few yards of pipe
have been chopped away and carried to a marine-store dealer; the
landings and the floors are strewn with dirt which a smart, cleanly
countrywoman would have cleared away without ten minutes' trouble. The
very windows are robbed; and the whole set of inhabitants rests in
contented, unspeakable squalor. No--something more is required than
delicate, silky-handed reform; something more is required than
ready-made blocks of neat dwellings; and something more is required
than sighing sentimentalism, which looks at miserable effects without
scrutinising causes. Let the sentimentalist mark this. If you
transplant a colony of "rooks" into good quarters, you will have
another rookery on your hands; if you remove a drove of brutes into
reasonable human dwelling-places, you will soon have a set of homes
fit for brutes and for brutes alone. Bricks and mortar and whitewash
will not change the nature of human vermin; phrases about beauty and
duty and loveliness will not affect the maker of slums, any more than
perfumes or pretty colours would affect the rats that squirm under the
foundations of the city. Does the sentimentalist imagine that the
brick-and-mortar structures about which he wails were always centres
of festering ugliness? If he has that fancy, let him take a glance at
some of the quaint old houses of Southwark. They were clean and
beautiful in their day, but the healthy human plant can no longer
flourish in them, and the weed creeps in, the crawling parasite
befouls their walls, and the structures which were lovely when
Chaucer's pilgrims started from the "Tabard" are abominable now. If
English folk of gentle and cleanly breeding had lived on in those
ancient places, they would have been wholesome and sound like many
another house erected in days gone by; but the weed gradually took
root, and now the ugliest dens in London are found in the places where
knights and trim clerks and gracious dames once lived. In the face of
all these things, how strangely unwise it is to fancy that ever the
Forlorn Army can be saved by bricks and mortar!
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