How the poor live

              HOW THE POOR LIVE.
39
CHAPTER VIII.
One of the greatest evils of the overcrowded districts of
London is the water supply. I might almost on this head
imitate the gentleman who wrote a chapter on Snakes in
Iceland, which I quote in its entirety—" There are no
snakes in Iceland." To say, however, that in these districts there is no water supply would be incorrect, but it is
utterly inadequate to the necessities of the people. In
many houses more water comes through the roof than
through a pipe, and a tub or butt in the back.yard about
half full of a black, foul-smelling liquid, supplies some
dozens of families with the water they drink and the water
THE WATER BUTT.
they wash in as well. It is, perhaps, owing to the limited
nature of the luxury that the use of water both internally
and externally is rather out of favour with the inhabitants.
As to water for sanitary purposes, there is absolutely no
provision for it in hundreds of the most densely-inhabited
houses. In the matter of water and air, the most degraded
savage British philanthropy has yet adopted as a pet is a
thousand times better off than the London labourer and
his family, dwelling in the areas whose horrors medical
officers are at last divulging to the public.
The difficulties of attaining that cleanliness which we
are told is next to godliness may be imagined from the
contemplation of this butt, sketched in the back yard of a
house containing over ninety people. The little boy in his
shirt-sleeves has come to fill his tin bowl, and we are indebted to him for the information that he wants it for his
mother to drink. The mother is ill—has been for weeks
—her lips are burning with fever, her throat is dry and
parched, and this common reservoir, open to all the dust
and dirt with which the air is thick, open to the draining
in rainy weather of the filthy roof of the tumble-down
structure beside it, this is the spring at which she is to
slake her thirst. Is it any wonder that disease is rampant,
or that the Temperance folk have such trouble to persuade the masses that cold water is a good and healthy
drink ?
Remember, this is absolutely the supply for the day ; it
is, perhaps, turned on for about five minutes, and , from
this butt the entire inhabitants of the house must get all
the water they want. In dozens of instances there is no
supply at all—accident or design has interfered with it,
and the housewife who wants to wash her child's face or
her own, or do a bit of scrubbing, has to beg of a neighbour or make a predatory excursion into a back yard more
blessed than her own.
Some of the facts about the water supply are not ea^sy to
deal with in articles for general reading, nor do they lend
themselves to the art of the illustrator. The hewer of wood
has found plenty of scope in this series, but the difficulties
of the "drawer of water" are great. It was while I and my
esteemed collaborator were debating how we could possibly
reproduce much that we had seen in connection with this
crying evil that a gentleman came along and gave us the
chance of at least one sketch " on the spot." You observe him busy at the side of a tub—a tub from which his
neighbours will fill their drinkin g and their culinary vessels
anon. Do not imagine that he is engaged in his morning
ablution. He is washing his potatoes—that is all—and in
the evening he will take them out baked, and sell them in
the public highway. For the sake of the public I am glad
they will be baked, but though the water will in some
instances be boiled, I don't think that tea is improved by
the dirt off potato-skins—at least I have never heard so.
Perhaps at the house where this tub was sketched the
inhabitants were not so much injured as they might have
been by the deficient water supply in the yard. If they
didn't get water in one way, they generally had it in
another. The law of compensation is always at work,
and the rapacity of a landlord who left his tenants so badly
off in one particular way may have been a godsend in
another.
The water in rainy weather simply poured through the
roof of this house, saturating the sleepers in their beds and
washing their faces in a rough-and-ready manner, but unfortunately it didn't rain towels at the same time, so that
the bath had its inconveniences.
The cause of these periodical shower-baths was pointed
out to us by a tenant who paid four and sixpence a week
for his " watery nest" in the attic, and who, in language
which did not tend to show that his enforced cleanliness
had brought godliness in its train, explained that the landlord had taken the lead from the roof and  sold it,  and