the man at the bottom in london
the carmania, the ship in which i had sailed, disembarked its passengers late saturday at fishguard, off the coast of wales. the special train which sped us on to london reached the city early sunday morning, august 28.
as i drove from the railway station in the gray of the early morning my attention was attracted by a strange, shapeless and disreputable figure which slunk out of the shadow of a building and moved slowly and dejectedly down the silent and empty street. in that quarter of the city, and in comparison with the solid respectability and comfort represented by the houses around him, the figure of this man seemed grotesquely wretched. in fact, he struck me as the most lonely object i had ever laid my eyes on. i watched him down the street as far as i could see. he turned neither to the left nor to the right, but moved slowly on, his head bent toward the ground, apparently looking for something he did not hope to find. in the
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course of my journey across europe i saw much poverty, but i do not think i saw anything quite so hopeless and wretched.
i had not been long in london before i learned that this man was a type. it is said that there are ten thousand of these homeless and houseless men and women in east london alone. they are, however, not confined to any part of the city. they may be found in the fashionable west end, lounging on the benches of st. james's park, as well as in the east end, where the masses of the labouring people live. the salvation army has erected shelters for them in many of the poorer parts of the city, where, for anything from two to eight cents, they may get a room for the night, and sometimes a piece of bread and a bowl of soup. thousands of them are not able to compass the small sum necessary to obtain even this minimum of food and comfort. these are the outcasts and the rejected, the human waste of a great city. they represent the man at the bottom in london.
later, in the course of my wanderings about the city, i met many of these hopeless and broken men. i saw them sitting, on sunshiny days, not only men but women also, crumpled up on benches or stretched out on the grass of the parks. i discovered them on rainy nights
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crouching in doorways or huddled away in dark corners where an arch or a wall protected them from the cold. i met them in the early morning hours, before the city was awake, creeping along the strand and digging with their hands in the garbage-boxes; and again, late at night, on the thames embankment, where hundreds of them sleep—when the night watchman permits—on the benches or stretched out on the stone pavements. after a time i learned to distinguish the same type under the disguise of those street venders who stand on street corners and sell collar-buttons, matches, and other trifles, stretching out their hands in a pitiful sort of supplication to passers-by to buy their wares.
whenever i found an opportunity to do so, i talked with some of these outcasts. gradually, partly from themselves and partly from others, i learned something of their histories. i found that it was usually drink that had been the immediate cause of their downfall. but there were always other and deeper causes. most of them, it seemed to me, had simply been borne down by the temptations and the fierce competition of life in a great city. there comes a time when trade is dull; men who had been accustomed to spend much money begin to spend less, and there is no work to be had. at
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these times it is "the less efficient, the less energetic, the less strong, the less young, the less regular, the less temperate, or the less docile" who are crowded out. in this way these men have lost their hold and sunk to the bottom.
i remember meeting one of these men late at night wandering along the thames embankment. in the course of my conversation with him i asked him, among other things, if he voted, and, if so, to what political party he belonged.
he looked at me in amazement, and then he said he had never voted in his life. it was his expression rather than his words that impressed me. this expression told me how out of touch he was with the world about him. he had, in fact, as i learned, no family, no home, friends, trade; he belonged to no society; he had, so far as i could learn, no views on life. in the very midst of this great city he was as solitary as a hermit.
a few weeks later, in a little village in galicia, i asked the same question of a polish peasant. "oh, yes," he eagerly replied; "every one votes here now."
sixty years ago most of the peasants in this village to which i have referred were serfs, and it was not until two years ago that the
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government gave them all the right to vote. nevertheless, at the present time the people in this village are represented by one of their own number in the imperial parliament at vienna. i stopped on my way through the village at the little store kept by this man. i found two young girls tending the store, his daughters, but the representative himself was not at home.
i do not know why i should mention this circumstance here, except that i was impressed by the contrast in the reply of these two men, the one coming from a peasant in poland and the other from an englishman in london.
it is generally said that the negro represents in america the man farthest down. in going to europe i had in mind to compare the masses of the negro people of the southern states with the masses in europe in something like the same stage of civilization. it would not be difficult to compare the negro in the south with the polish peasant, for example, because the masses of the poles are, like the masses of the negroes, an agricultural people.
i know no class among the negroes in america, however, with whom i could compare the man at the bottom in england. whatever one may say of the negro in america, he is not, as a rule, a beggar. it is very rarely that any one sees a black hand stretched out for alms. one
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does see, to be sure, too many idle and loafing negroes standing on the street corners and around the railway stations in the south, but the negro is not, as a rule, a degenerate. if he is at the bottom in america, it is not because he has gone backward and sunk down, but because he has never risen.
another thing in regard to the negro: although he is frequently poor, he is never without hope and a certain joy in living. no hardship he has yet encountered, either in slavery or in freedom, has robbed the negro of the desire to live. the race constantly grew and increased in slavery, and it has considerably more than doubled in freedom. there are some people among the members of my race who complain about the hardships which the negro suffers, but none of them yet, so far as i know, has ever recommended "race suicide" as a solution of the race problem.
i mention this because i found just the contrary to be the case in england. i do not think that anything i saw or heard while i was in england gave me a more poignant impression of the hardships of the labouring man in england than the discovery that one of the most widely read weekly papers in england, under the caption of "the white slaves of morality," was making a public campaign in
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favour of reducing the size of the families among the working classes.
the articles i refer to, which were written by a woman, were a protest, on the one hand, against the clergy because they taught that it would be immoral for women to refuse to have children, and, on the other hand, against the physicians who withheld from these women the knowledge by which they might be able to limit the size of their families. these articles were followed from week to week by letters purporting to come from working men and women telling of the heartbreaking struggle they were making to support their children on the wages they were able to earn.
what made these articles the more startling was the fact that, at the very time when they were proposing to the english labourer what ex-president roosevelt has defined as "race suicide," thousands of immigrants from the south of europe were pouring into london every year to take the places left vacant by the recession of the native anglo-saxon.
on my previous visit to england i had been struck by what seemed to me the cold and formal character of the english newspapers. it seemed to me that they were wholly lacking in human interest. upon my last visit my opinion in regard to the london newspapers was
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considerably altered. a careful study of the daily newspaper, i found, will repay any one who wants to get an insight into social conditions in england.
i had not been in london more than a day or two, for example, when my attention was attracted to the following item in one of the morning papers:
starving family
coroner's appeal to the public for aid
telling of a terrible case of starvation in the stoke newington coroner's court, dr. wynn westcott, the coroner, asked the press to bring a deserving case before the notice of the charitable public.
he said that he had held an inquest upon a three-weeks-old baby which had died of starvation. its father had had no regular work for three years, and only a little casual work in that time. there was so little money that the mother, mrs. attewell, of white hart street, stoke newington, was half starved too. she had only had a crust of bread to sustain her on the day her child died, although she had done nine and a half hours' washing to assist the home.
the home was perfectly clean, although practically destitute of furniture. it was a most deserving case.
after reading this item i began studying the papers more closely, and i was surprised at the frequency with which items of this kind occurred. i learned that the local government board, which is represented in the english cabinet by mr. john burns, has issued since 1871 an annual report, or return, as it is called,
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of the cases in which, upon formal investigation by a coroner's jury, it appears that the persons came to their death in london as a result of starvation. i obtained a copy of the return for 1908, in which are included the statistics on starvation not merely for london but for the rest of england and wales.
the forms issued to coroners were explicit. they provided that the return should include only cases in which the jury found that death was brought about by starvation or privation due to destitution. cases in which death was caused by cold, starvation, exposure, etc., unconnected with destitution, were not entered in this return. of the one hundred and twenty-five cases of starvation reported, fifty-two occurred in london. in eleven cases death was described as due to starvation in conjunction with some other cause—that is to say, disease, drink, exposure, or self-neglect. in eighty of the one hundred and twenty-five cases no application was made for poor relief, or application was made only when the deceased had been in a dying condition.
a few days after i had succeeded in getting this report my attention was attracted one morning by the heading of a newspaper article: "how the poor die." the article was an account of the finding of the body of an unknown
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woman in a cellar in the basement of a house not very far from where i was stopping.
"it appears," the article said, "that during the earlier part of the morning a tenant of the building observed a woman sleeping in the cellar, but no particular notice was taken of this because of the fact that strangers frequently utilized the cellar for such purposes. mr. oliver, one of the occupants of the building, had occasion to go downstairs, and saw the woman. she was crouched in a corner and her head was lying back. the police were called in and the services of doctor barton were requisitioned.... although the cause of death will not be known until a post-mortem examination of the body has been made, death, it is thought, was due to starvation. the woman was about six feet in height, between forty and fifty years of age, and was in a very emaciated condition and clad in very scanty attire."
not infrequently, when in my public speeches i have made some reference to the condition of the negro in the south, certain members of my own race in the north have objected because, they said, i did not paint conditions in the south black enough. during my stay in england i had the unusual experience of being criticised in the london newspapers for the same reason, this time by an american
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white man. at the very moment that this man attacked me because in my public interviews i emphasized the opportunities rather than the wrongs of the negro in the south i had in my possession the document to which i have referred, which gives the official history of fifty-two persons, one for every week in the year, who had died in the city of london alone for want of food.
i have never denied that the negro in the south frequently meets with wrong and injustice; but he does not starve. i do not think a single case was ever heard of, in the south, where a negro died from want of food. in fact, unless because of sickness or some other reason he has been unable to work, it is comparatively rare to find a negro in an almshouse.
it has not been my purpose in anything i have written to pass judgment upon the people or the conditions that i have found in the countries which i have visited. criticism is an ungrateful task at best, and one for which i am not well fitted. neither shall i attempt to offer any suggestions as to how conditions may be improved; in fact, i am convinced from what i learned that the people on the ground understand conditions much better than i possibly could, and in a later chapter i hope to tell something of the great work that has been done in
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england and elsewhere to raise the level of life and comfort among the people who are at the bottom in the countries which i visited. what i am anxious to do here is to emphasize some of the advantages which it seems the members of my own race, and particularly those living in the southern states, have at the present time. it is not difficult to discover the disadvantages under which the negroes in the south labour. every traveller who passes through the south sees the conditions existing, and frequently returns to write books about them. there is danger, however, that the opportunities to which i have referred will be overlooked or not fully appreciated by the members of my race until it is too late.
one direction in which the negro in the south has an advantage is in the matter of labour. one of the most pitiful things i saw in london, liverpool, and other english cities was the groups of idle men standing about on the street corners, especially around the bar-rooms, because they were not able to get work.
one day, as i was going along one of the main avenues of the city, i noticed an unusually large crowd standing in front of a street organ which was drawn up at the side of the pavement. pausing to see what there was about this organ that attracted so much attention and interest,
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i found that the man who owned this instrument was using it as a method of advertising his poverty.
all over the front of the organ were plastered papers and documents of various kinds. on one side there was a list of advertisements cut from the "want" columns of the daily newspapers. attached to this was a statement that these were some of the places that the man had visited the day before in search of work, which he was not able to find. on the other side of the organ were attached six or seven pawn tickets, with the statement that "these are some of the articles which my dear wife pawned to get food for our children." this was followed by a pitiful appeal for help. the pathetic thing about it was that the only persons who stopped to look at these exhibits besides myself were a group of hungry and disreputable-looking men who were evidently in just as great want as the man who ground the organ. i watched those men. after reading the signs they would look inquiringly at the other members of the group and then relapse into the same stolid silence which i had noticed so many times in the forlorn figures that filled the benches of the parks.
it seemed to me that they both pitied and admired the man who had conceived this novel
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way of advertising his misfortune. i have noticed these same people in other cases where it seemed to me they looked with something like envy upon a beggar who was blind or lame or had some other interesting misfortune which enabled him to win the sympathy of the public.
of course the persons that i have attempted to describe do not represent the labouring classes. they represent the man at the bottom, who lives by begging or casual labour. it shows, nevertheless, how bitter is the struggle for existence among the labouring class higher up, that the class below, the class which lives in actual poverty, is so large and so much in evidence.
while i was in london i received letters from a great many persons of all classes and conditions. one of these was from a coloured man who was born and raised in the south and was anxious to get back home. i am tempted to quote some passages of his letter here, because they show how conditions impressed a coloured man from the south who got closer to them than i was able to. he had been living, he said, in london for fourteen months without work.
"i have tried to apply for work," he continued. "they said they want englishmen. it seems to me that all britain are against the negro race. some say, 'go back to your own
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country,' knowing if i had the means i would fly to-morrow."
perhaps i would do better to quote some passages from his letter verbatim. he says:
i cannot get a passage; to be alone in london without any help or funds, like a pin in a haystack, nothing but sorrow and distress. hearing mr. b. t. washington were in london i appeal to him in the name of god almighty if he can possibly help me with a ticket to get across, because the lady that was kind enough to give me a shelter is without fund herself; being a christian woman she gave me food for what she can afford. at night i have to sleep in a house with a widow which has two children which has to make her living by chopping wood, whom some day, does not earn enough to buy a loaf of bread for her children. the winter is coming on and i like to get home to shuck corn or to get to maryland for a oyster draggin. it is a long time since i had watermelon, pig's feet and corn. say, mr. washington, if you ever knew what a man in a hole is i guess i am in a hole and the cover over. i can see the pork chops and the corn bread and the hot biscuits calling me to come over and get some and many a time i have tried but failed. i can't reach them; the great atlantic ocean stop me and i remain
your obedient servant,——
this letter from which i have given a few extracts is but one of many which i received during my stay in london, not only from coloured but from white americans who had come to england to better their condition or seek their fortune.
these letters served still further to impress me with the fact that the masses of my own people in the south do not fully appreciate the
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advantages which they have in living in a country where there is a constant demand for labour of all kinds and where even poor people do not starve.
if i were asked what i believed would be the greatest boon that could be conferred upon the english labourer, i should say that it would be for him to have the same opportunities for constant and steady work that the negro now has in the south. if i were asked what would be the next greatest benefit that could be conferred upon the english labourer, i should say that it would be to have schools in which every class could learn to do some one thing well—to have, in other words, the benefit of the kind of industrial education that we are seeking, in some measure, to give to the negro at the present time in the southern states.
