How the poor live

              HOW THE POOR LIVE.
35
great city, which I have attempted feebly to describe in
these papers—render the masses peculiarly susceptible to
illness in every shape and form. Epidemics of some sort
or other are rarely absent from the poorer districts, and
many painful diseases and deformities are transmitted
regularly from parent to child. To be sound of limb and
well in health in these dens is bad enough, but the existence
of an invalid under such circumstances is pitiable to a
degree. The hospitals are the heavens-upon-earth of the
poor. I have heard little children—their poor pinched
faces wrinkled with pain—murmur that they didn't mind it,
because if they had been well they would never have come
to " the beautiful place." Beautiful, indeed, by contrast with
their wretched homes are the clean wards, the comfortable beds, and the kind faces of the nurses. Step across
from the home of a sick child in the slums of the Borough
to the Evelina Hospital, and it is like passing from the
infernal regions to Paradise. To this noble charity little
sufferers are often brought dirty, neglected, starving; and
even the nurses, used as they are to such sights, will tell
you their hearts ache at the depth of baby wretchedness
revealed in some of the cases brought to them.
Passing from cot to cot, and hearing the histories of the
little ones lying there so clean, and, in spite of their
suffering, so happy, one is inclined to think that the charity
is a mistake—that to nurse these children back to health
only to send them again to their wretched homes is a
species of refined cruelty. It were better in dozens of
cases that the children were left to die now, while they are
young and innocent, than that death should be wrestled
with and its prize torn from it only to be cast back into a
state of existence which is worse than death.
The children have some dim inkling of this themselves.
Many of them cry when they are well, and cling to the
kind nurses, asking piteously not to be sent back to the
squalor and dirt, and often, alas ! cruelty, from which they
have been snatched for a brief spell. Here is a child at
home and the same child in the hospital. Contrast the
surroundings. Look on this picture and on that, and then
say if there is not at least some ground for such a train
of thought as the Hospital for Sick Children suggested
to me!
The elder people doubtless appreciate the blessings of the
hospital as much as the children. The poor generally
speak in the highest terms of such institutions. They could
not, as a rule, lie ill at home; care and attention would be
impossible; and for a sick person the atmosphere would
mean certain death. Doctors they cannot afford to pay.
The class of practitioners who lay themselves out for
business in these neighbourhoods are not, as a rule, much
more than nostrum and patent-medicine vendors, and their
charges are generally extortionate. If you could bring
yourself to imagine truthfully the condition of the sick poor
without the hospitals to go to, you would see a picture of
human misery so appalling that you would cover your eyes
and turn away from it with a shudder.
Yet there are such pictures to be seen. There are cases
which, from varying circumstances, do not go to the hospital.
There are men and women who lie and die day by day in
these wretched single rooms, sharing all the family trouble,
enduring the hunger and the cold, and waiting without hope,
without a single ray of comfort, until God curtains their
staring eyes with the merciful film of death.
It was such a case we came upon once in our wanderings,
and which, without unduly harrowing the reader up, I will
endeavour to describe.
The room was no better and no worse than hundreds of
its class. It was dirty and dilapidated, with the usual bulging blackened ceiling, and the usual crumbling greasy walls.
Its furniture was a dilapidated four-post bedstead, a chair,
and a deal table. On the bed lay a woman, young and with
features that before hourly anguish contorted them had
been comely. The woman was dying slowly of heart disease. Death was " writ large" upon her face. At her
breast she held her child, a poor little mite of a baby that
was drawing the last drain of life from its mother's breast.
The day was a bitterly cold one; through the broken casement the wind came ever and anon in icy gusts, blowing
the hanging end of the ragged coverlet upon the bed to and
fro like a flag in a breeze. The wind roared in the chimney
too, eddying down into the tireless grate with a low howling
noise like the moan of a Banshee round a haunted house.
To protect the poor woman from the cold her husband had
flung on it his tattered great coat—a garment that the most
ancient four-wheel night cabman would have spurned as a
knee protector. " He was a plumber," she whispered to us
in a weak, hollow voice; " he had been out of work for a
week, and he had gone out to try and look for a job." One
shivered to think of him wearily trudging the streets this
bitter day, half clad and wholly starved; what must have
been his torture as he failed at place after place, and the
day wore on and brought the night when he would have to
return to the poor dying wife with the old sad story ?
As one realised the full meaning of this little domestic
tragedy, and knew that it was only one of many daily
enacted in the richest city in the world—the .scene of it laid
not a mile from the full tide of all the pomps and vanities
of fashion, of all the notorious luxury and extravagances
which is the outward show of our magnificence and wealth,
it was hard to repress a feeling of something akin to shame
and anger—shame for the callous indifference which bids
one half the world ignore the sufferings of the other—anger
that with all the gold annually borne along on the broad
stream of charity so little of it ever reaches the really
deserving and necessitous poor.
The house this poor woman lay dying in was one of a
block which would have been a prize to a sanitary inspector
anxious to make a sensational report. For the room in
question the plumber out of work had to pay four and sixpence, and the broken pane of glass the landlord had refused to replace. The man was told " he must do it himself,
or if he didn't like it as it was he could go."
Such stories as this are painful, but they should be told.
It is good for the rich that now and again they should be
brought face to face with misery, or they might doubt its
existence. These people—our fellow-citizens—cannot be
neglected with impunity. These fever and pestilence-
breeding dens that are still allowed to exist, these death-