View report page

31
method of attaching responsibility to the parents for the condition
of their children. In a logically governed state it would be recognized
that, if a section of the public be allowed to enjoy the
privileges of free education, it should be an essential part of the
contract, made between the parents and the State, that the
children should be sent to school in a condition that would not
make it preferable for cleanly persons to forego the advantages of
State education for their children in order that they may not become
verminous. It is really ludicrous that a single contumacious
or alcoholic mother in a slum should be able, thanks to our law, or
absence of law, to defy and frustrate the persuasions and
endeavours of all the highly trained officials and public spirited
persons to whom I have just alluded, and to waste a great deal of
public money and time, before her child's head can be freed from
vermin. One thinks sometimes that the old dogma of the liberty
of the subject has been degraded into a defence of the sacred
right of the democracy to be dirty. A great part of the trouble is
caused by the maternal notion that it is degrading for her child to
be sent to school with hair cut short, or in a neat pigtail like a
Swiss. The slum slattern prefers to send Gladys or Doris to
school with her hair hanging in unwholesome and repulsive wisps,
with one lock fatuously done up in a dirty ribbon, and the entire
scheme completed, not by a neat cap or turban, but by a ludicrous
"pitcher 'at." Thus vermin are propagated and "class distinctions"
broken down. I would not for one moment, in writing
these things, be thought to ignore the fact that very often, amongst
the poor, one finds instances of families brought up to even
fastidious personal cleanliness. It is in the interests of these that
I would call attention to the dirtiness of others. It is however
worth noting, and my real acquaintance with the homes of the
working class is pretty considerable, that the good homes
are nearly always those of persons bred in the country, and
trained in service in families or on estates; while the bad homes