'I Believe' and other essays Part 15

The recent case of a young Hereford sprinter who, by impersonating another runner, secured a prize of the value of 4, and who was ordered by the Bench to pay three guineas towards the cost of the prosecution and refund the prize or its equivalent value, shows that the justices are doing all they can to a.s.sist the Amateur Athletic a.s.sociation in preserving amateur athletics for the pure sportsman.

It is to be regretted that such instances are by no means rare, and the Amateur Athletic a.s.sociation has several cases in hand at the present time. The a.s.sociation is, however, determined to put a stop to the practice.

The trick of impersonating amateurs and thereby winning prizes at athletic sports is, in fact, as old as the hills, and years ago used to be carried on unblus.h.i.+ngly and free from detection.

One of the earliest cases on record was that of a man at Ashford. His head was as innocent of hair as a billiard ball, and to play the part properly it was necessary for him to wear a wig. He was winning his race easily enough, when his hirsute adornment was blown off by the wind, and the attempted fraud ended in failure.

Quite recently there were two brothers in the army, one an amateur and the other a professional. The latter impersonated the former with sufficient success as to secure the prize; but although the fraud was afterwards discovered, it was felt that the evidence was not strong enough to secure a conviction.

In a similar case in the Northampton district a couple of years ago, the judge took a serious view of the case, and the offender received exemplary punishment.

Strong action is undoubtedly needed to stamp out the practice, and the Amateur Athletic a.s.sociation will leave no stone unturned in its endeavours to purify it.

VAGROM MEN

VI

VAGROM MEN

[AN ADDRESS DELIVERED TO THE WORKING MEN'S CLUB, ST. MARGARETS']

"_In the sweat of thy face shall thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground._"--GENESIS iii. 19.

In the November of last year--1905--I was invited to consider the problem which is known as "The Unemployed Question," and to write something about it in a London daily paper. In 1905 the subject was attracting the attention of every one, and it was thought that by means of my own method--the method of Fiction--I might possibly interest people.

I welcomed the opportunity, and wrote a story expressing my views, which was published among the news columns of the _Daily Mail_.

Before the tale began to appear I had several conferences with Lord Northcliffe, then Sir Alfred Harmsworth, the editor of the newspaper.

Certain facts were told me; a ma.s.s of expert opinion and evidence was placed at my disposal, and I was enjoined to study my new material and write exactly as I felt about the question. No restrictions were placed upon my point of view. I suppose that very rarely indeed has it happened to an ordinary novelist that the ruling powers of a journal which has one of the largest circulations in the world have said, "Here are our columns; come and say what you think in them."

It is, no doubt, good journalism to print a single article written by a man whose conviction on the subject of the article is diametrically opposed to that of the newspaper in which it is published. A standard of value is created by an exhibition of contrasts. It is good journalism also to print the views of experts such as Mr. Booth or Mr.

McKenzie. Both these things are constantly done. But to give a novelist columns of enormously valuable s.p.a.ce for some weeks--"news s.p.a.ce," not the s.p.a.ce generally reserved for fiction--in order that he may express his own ideas, is very unusual. At the time when this was offered to me I thought it a very great compliment. I can hardly believe that I was mistaken, and I think so still.

I wrote the story, and called it, _Made in His Image_. When it had run through the newspaper it was published in book form. Fourteen months have gone by, and during them I have endeavoured to keep myself informed as to the position of affairs. With the additional knowledge that the past year and its inquiries have given me, I find myself still of precisely the same opinion as I was before. If anything, my conviction is stronger than before. What my opinions are, such conclusions as I have come to, I have been invited to tell you to-night.

I will get to the point at once without further preamble, save only to say how much I value the privilege of addressing you.

For a long time past every cla.s.s of the community has been exercised by the problem of the unemployed. The question has steadily become more acute year by year, and at the present moment its solution is the most pressing and necessary of all that confront thinking men and women.

I propose to touch briefly upon the existing state of things, to explain what I conclude to be the cause of it, and to set before you my belief as to the only remedy.

In London, Manchester, Birmingham, and all the great cities of England, the streets are full of men with bright eyes, and faces cut and whittled to an edge by hunger. Men and women with kindly hearts and sympathetic natures cannot go abroad in winter unless they taste the bitterness of sights and sounds that tear the heart and lacerate the soul.

Dismal and terrible processions move throughout the streets of our capitals like spectres from the underworld. I have myself, in the course of my investigations, been packed tight among a crowd of tattered, coughing humans in London. I have walked with them, brethren of yours and mine, men who offended and distressed every sense, men who groaned and sighed because they had not eaten, men who exhaled an odour like the caged animals in a menagerie, men who fed, when they fed at all, upon garbage, men who could not wash.

I have seen faces all round me like the faces that the great Italian poet Dante describes as flitting through the gloom of h.e.l.l. On one side is a face grown witless from hunger, sorrow, and foul environment. It is a horrible face, a face like a gla.s.s of dirty water. Another face is simply a grey drawn wedge of cunning; a third man has a face that might have been that of a saint, but the horror of his life has put its heel upon the countenance, and has ground the possibility to pulp. I have stood among living bodies which have no heat in them, a company of ghosts that cough and curse in bloodless voices. And among these gaunt, dismal, and hopeless men the one who can snarl and cry his sorrows loudly is the one who is envied by all the rest. He must have had a meal that day.

I expect many of you have seen something of what I describe, and those who have had this sad experience will bear witness that I am exaggerating nothing. This is not Fiction; it is melancholy Truth. In the opening chapter of the story I wrote on the Unemployed question, I described a meeting of the Unemployed in Trafalgar Square. In the course of the chapter I told how some charitable people drove up with a cart full of buns and bread and b.u.t.ter. Immediately there was a riot. The poor starving people fought with each other for the food like wolves. The scene was horrible. This first chapter appeared on November 18, in the _Daily Mail_. Two days afterwards I met a friend in my London Club who had read it. "My dear fellow," he said, "you've let your imagination run away with you. A story is all very well, but it should closely follow the lines of fact. Don't you tell me that English workmen are in such a pa.s.s that they will fight for a morsel of food in the heart of London. You're coming it a bit _too_ tall, my dear chap."

He was a ruddy, prosperous friend. As he came into the Club smoking-room he gave a heavy fur coat, which probably cost him fifty guineas, to one of the waiters. He called for a whisky and soda, and sank into an arm-chair of red leather with a comfortable sigh of pleasure. He stretched out his legs towards a blazing fire of logs, and said again, "You novelist johnnies are always coming it a bit too thick, don't you know!"

My worthy friend was one of those who have eyes but see not; because they won't see, and don't wish to see.

Now listen to the sequel--

Three days after this a procession of Unemployed marched along the Embankment in London. Some charitable people did actually bring down a cart of food. _There was a riot and a fight for the food exactly as I had foreseen in my imaginary tale._ It was reported in the newspaper.

Five days after I had imagined that, under existing conditions, something _might_ happen, that thing actually _did_ happen--men came fighting for a sc.r.a.p of bread in the heart of the Metropolis.

This is what we see in the great streets of London and other towns--the streets full of shops which are crammed with costly and beautiful things, thronged with prosperous people. What we see when we follow the procession of the Unemployed back to the awful dens in which they live is impossible to do more than hint at. To tell the absolute unvarnished truth in a public a.s.sembly, to publish a faithful description in a public print is an utter impossibility. These dreadful facts are those which despairing clergymen and ministers, doctors, nurses, would-be helpers, tell to each other in whispers.

I knew a lady whose husband had turned out worthless, and who finally deserted her. Her one source of income was a row of small houses in the East End of London, houses that were let out in rooms to the very poor. My friend was too poor to employ an agent to collect her rents and draw a commission for his work. Every week she did so herself, and one week she invited me to accompany her. I did so, and it was the most horrible day I ever spent. No working man in a district such as this can form any idea of the filth and misery in which the lost, degraded tenants of these houses lived. I shall not attempt to describe it, for it would be a poor return for your kindness in coming here to-night to rob you of your night's rest!

I will merely quote some lines written by Mr. F. A. McKenzie, one of the foremost sociologists of the day. They deal with the lives of the Unemployed in the East End of London, and they are guarded, reticent words.

I read--

"To say that scores of thousands of them are facing the coming winter with fear and dread is but mildly to imply their situation. They are the derelicts of London, whom the changes in modern conditions have left hopelessly behind. Without crafts, without knowledge, many of them with hope dead, they face a future that good trade can do little to relieve, and bad trade must greatly darken."

"The prodigal son" of to-day plays out the last act of his tragedy, not before a fatted calf, but in a Poplar back room. The s.h.i.+ftless and incapables, attracted by low rent, by the chance of casual work, and by the abundance of relief, drift here. To them are added the scores of thousands of locally born people who are trained in such a way that they cannot be anything else than casuals.

The very streets proclaim the lives of these people. Apart from the main thoroughfares and from certain more prosperous avenues, you are swallowed up in an endless succession of long roads of cheaply built houses. The walls are crumbling, and the bricks seem as though they would fall at a blow; many houses have broken, paper-stuffed windows; there are whole streets where the doors and windows have not seen paint for a generation. The children, babies with ophthalmic eyes, girls dirty beyond belief play in the gutters. The women gossip at the doors. The men, strong, yet none wanting their strength, lounge at street corners.

In home after home you will find that the sole regular wage earned is by a young son, who obtains ten s.h.i.+llings a week as errand boy in the City. On this, with occasional additions from the others, the whole family exists. The mother may obtain a few s.h.i.+llings a week at 'charing,' although such work is scarce in Poplar.

Twenty years ago the poverty of the East End was lessened by the home work which the women could obtain. It is one of the most serious, although often overlooked, factors of to-day that such home work cannot be had save by a few. The aliens in Whitechapel and in Stepney absorb almost all of it. The foreigners are more capable, more thrifty, and more sober, and, save where brute strength is required, our own derelicts stand no chance before them. The homes inside are often enough indescribable. Here and there you find the one room kept clean, but generally dirt is the outstanding feature. The beds are black ma.s.ses of filth. The walls of the rooms prevent real cleanliness. I went into one two-roomed tenement inhabited by a man, wife and three children. The kitchen was overrun with rats, which had free entrance and exit through numerous holes in the wall. In the bedroom a large part of the lath and plaster wall underneath the window was torn away, leaving great gaps open to the yard. 'Why doesn't your landlord do some repairs here?' my companion asked. 'He won't, sir; he says it is healthy for us to have holes in the walls,'

the woman replied. Many of these Poplar rooms urgently require the active intervention of the local sanitary officers.

In such fetid dens, badly built, ill kept, and furnished with the strangest of oddments, most of the Poplar poor live.

If it were necessary and part of my scheme this evening, I could take up the whole of our time in telling the truth about the existing horrors. But I do not think that any one will deny them. They exist, and no one can disprove the fact. Let us rather consider _why_ they exist, and what their existence means to the working man.

Stated in a few brief words, this is my theory and my unalterable belief.

IF THERE WERE NO UNEMPLOYABLES THERE WOULD BE NO UNEMPLOYED.

To amplify my statement I will say--and in a moment I will endeavour to prove--that if the idle, vicious, hopeless and sullen scoundrels who act as a drag upon the wheel of the Commonwealth, who have been allowed too long to clog social progress, were removed, the whole problem would be solved.

I beg you to listen carefully to me while I tell you how the _Unemployables_ have created the problem of the Unemployed, how they are throttling charitable enterprise, how they are making economic methods of relief impossible, how they are destroying the present and the future of the honest working man. Who are the people I have called "The Unemployables"? What is _their_ idea of work and what is the _real ideal_ of work? I will answer these questions. I will show you who and what the Unemployables are. I will contrast their att.i.tude towards honest toil with the att.i.tude of honest men towards toil, and when I have done this I will try to explain how these people are injuring you and me, what a terrible burden they are upon our backs.

The month before my story dealing with the Unemployed appeared in the _Daily Mail_, a series of articles on the same subject was published.

In some of them the Unemployables were painted with perfect fidelity and vividness. I take some paragraphs here and there to make a connected picture.