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Parish of Saint George the Martyr, Southwark.
I should be sorry to bear harshly upon this class, and justly so, when we think of the
life they have had to live, and from which escape seems to have been impossible. "To
believe that" they are here only as a nuisance and a terrour to be abraded and abated, and
by some permissable manner to be made away with and swept out of sight, is not an
amiable faith." There are two factors which exercise power over us, and over which we
exercise none: one is, the temperament transmitted to us at our birth; and the other is, the
place and surroundings of our birth. To understand their way of life, and fully to sympathise
with them, we should needs hare to pass through their experience; for no man can
artificially put himself into the dangers, and temptations, and responsibilities of another.
What first reaches their tender and undefiled ears? The foulest oaths and blasphemies
which our language can afford. As children they grow up as familiar with these, as
with the light which shines around them. They are further brutalised by the treatment
they receive from their parents, or from those who hold authority over them. And we may
conceive their painful and sorrowful fate, should they return empty handed from their raids
upon society. There are thousands of Boys who have no home, nor lodgings, nor food, nor
one human being amongst the three millions to give them one kind word, one look of sympathy.
Any shelter by day, and a dry arch by night supply their dwelling. "Let us think,"
says that earnest writer the Rev. Baldwin Brown, "let us think tenderly of those myriads
of little ones whom the morning light wakes up to hunger, filth, and wretchedness; while
the shadows hunt them into lairs, into which you would not couch your beasts."
And homes when they possess them, are as unlike what homes should be as it is possible
to imagine. They are, as I have previously said, situated in the most unhealthy, the
most joyless, and the most wretched parts of a District. They are neglected and dirty to a
degree. In them huddle together in filth and raggedness men and women, young and old
indiscriminately, that the practice of morality is set at defiance. Every chink and crevice
of the rooms are stopped; no outlet is provided for the foul air, nor inlet provided for
the fresh; hence they become vitiated with the exhalations from unwashen, ill-fed, and
often diseased bodies, with re-breathed air, and with a putrescent substance which is
highly injurious and offensive. It is this latter that produces the smell so characteristic of
the rooms and the clothes of the poor. These with other gases engendered and impaired
are absorbed into the blood, and thence distributed to the brain and nervous system, and
indeed to every part of the body, perverting, and almost if not quite abolishing the moral
faculties, stunting the intellect and deteriorating the body.
How, under such circumstances, can affection, or kindness, or those tender ties which
bind families together be developed? Can we expect gentleness, honesty, or the social
courtesies of life from such a source? This class are as ignorant of these qualities as the
roaming savage of the prairie, or the lowest specimens of humanity met with in Africa or
Australia. "I have seen human nature," says an experienced traveller, "in all its forms;
it is everywhere the same; but the wilder it is the more virtuous." Such a class dwelling
in our midst in this the nineteenth century is a curse and a humiliation. They have been
passed by and neglected, and allowed to grovel in ignorance and house together until they
have grown up a body threatning to society.