How the poor live

              HOW THE POOR LIVE.
20
not looked to in time. Its fevers and its filth may spread
to the homes of the wealthy ; its lawless armies may sally
forth and give us a taste of the lesson the mob has tried to
teach now and again in Paris, when long years of neglect
have done their work.
Happily there is a brighter side. Education—compulsory
education—has done much. The new generation is learning
at least to be clean if not>to be honest. The young mothers of
the slums—the girls who have been at the Board Schools—
have far tidier homes already than their elders. The old
people born and bred in filth won't live out of it. If you
gave some of the slumites Buckingham Palace they would
make it a pigstye in a fortnight. These people are irreclaimable, but they will die out, and the new race can be
worked for with hope and with a certainty of success. Hard
as are some of the evils of the Education Act, they are
outbalanced by the good, and it is that Act above all others
which will eventually bring about the new order of things
so long desired.
So important a bearing on the home question has the
schooling of the children who are to be the rent-payers of
the next generation, that I propose to devote the next
chapter to some sketches of School Board life and
character; and I will take it in one of the worst districts
in London, where the parents are sunk in a state of misery
almost beyond belief.
I will show you the children at school who come daily
to their work from the foulest and dirtiest dens in London
—that awful network of hovels which lie about the Borough
and the Mint.
CHAPTER VI.
HE difficulty of getting
that element of pictu-
resqueness into these
Chapters which is so essential to success with
a large class of English
readers, becomes mpre
and more apparent as
I and my travelling companion explore region
after region where the
poor are hidden away
to live as best they can.
There is a monotony in
the surroundings which
became painfully apparent to us, and were
our purpose less earnest
than it is we might well
pause dismayed at the
task we have undertaken.
The Mint and the
Borough present scenes awful enough in all conscience to
be worthy of earnest study; but scene after scene is the
same, Rags, dirt, filth, wretchedness, the same figures, the
same faces, the same old story of one room unfit for
habitation yet inhabited by eight or nine people, the same
complaint of a ruinous rent absorbing three-fourths of the
toiler's weekly wage, the same shameful neglect by the
owner of the property of all sanitary precautions, rotten
floors, oozing walls, broken windows, crazy staircases, tile-
less roofs, and in and around the dwelling-place of hundreds
of honest citizens the nameless abominations which could
only be set forth were we contributing to the Lancet
instead of the Pictorial World;—these are the things
which confront us, whether we turn to the right or to
the left, whether we linger in the Mint or seek fresh fields
in the slums that lie round Holborn, or wind our adventurous footsteps towards the network of dens that lie
within a stone's-throw of our great National Theatre,
Drury Lane.
The story of one slum is the story of another, and all
are unrelieved by the smallest patch of that colour which
lends a charm to pictures of our poorest peasantry. God
made the country, they say, and man the town ; and
wretched as is the lot of the agricultural labourer, the
handiwork of Heaven still remains to give some relief to
the surroundings of his miserable life. Field and tree and
flower, the green of the meadow and the hedge, the gold
and white of buttercup and daisy, the bright hues of the
wild cottage garden,—it is in the midst of these the pigstyes
of the rustic poor are pitched, and there is scope for the
artist's brush. But in the slums he can use but one colour;
all is a monotone—a sombre grey deepening into the blackness of night. Even the blue that in the far-off skies seems
to defy the man-made town to be utterly colourless, is
obscured by the smoke belched forth from a hundred
chimneys ; and when the sun, which shines with systematic
impartiality on the righteous and unrighteous alike, is
foiled in its efforts to get at these outcasts by the cunning
builders, who have put house so close to house that even a
sunbeam which had trained down to the proportions of
Mdlle. Sarah Bernhardt, and then been flattened by a steamroller, could not force its way between the overhanging
parapets with any chance of getting to the ground. So what
sunshine there is stops on the roofs among the chimney-pots,
and is the sole property of the cats of the neighbourhood,
who may be seen dozing about in dozens or indulging in
a pastime which they have certainly not learnt of their
masters and mistresses, namely, washing their faces.
The cat-life of the slums is peculiar. Dogs are rare, but
the cats are as common as blackberries in September. Not
over clean and not over fat, the cats of the slums yet seem
perfectly contented, and rarely leave the district in which
they have been reared. They ascend to the roof early in
the day, and stay there long after darkness has set in, and in
the choice of a local habitation they show their feline sense.
The rooms of their respective owners offer neither air nor sunshine, and when " the fa.nily " are all at home, it is possibly
the inability of finding even a vacant corner to curl up in that
drives Thomas to that part of a house which the people of
the East consider the best, but which the people of our East
have never sought to utilise.