第69章

Drink, Temperance, and Thrift.

Sometimes the poor are praised for being thrifty.

But to recommend thrift to the poor is both grotesque and insulting.It is like advising a man who is starving to eat less.For a town or country laborer to practice thrift would be absolutely immoral.Man should not be ready to show that he can live like a badly-fed animal.

-OSCAR WILDE.

THE ENGLISH WORKING CLASSES may be said to be soaked in beer.They are made dull and sodden by it.Their efficiency is sadly impaired, and they lose whatever imagination, invention, and quickness may be theirs by right of race.It may hardly be called an acquired habit, for they are accustomed to it from their earliest infancy.Children are begotten in drunkenness, saturated in drink before they draw their first breath, born to the smell and taste of it, and brought up in the midst of it.

The public house is ubiquitous.It flourishes on every corner and between corners, and it is frequented almost as much by women as by men.Children are to be found in it as well, waiting till their fathers and mothers are ready to go home, sipping from the glasses of their elders, listening to the coarse language and degrading conversation, catching the contagion of it, familiarizing themselves with licentiousness and debauchery.

Mrs.Grundy rules as supremely over the workers as she does over the bourgeoisie; but in the case of the workers, the one thing she does not frown upon is the public house.No disgrace or shame attaches to it, nor to the young woman or girl who makes a practice of entering it.

I remember a girl in a coffee-house saying, 'I never drink spirits when in a public 'ouse.' She was a young and pretty waitress, and she was laying down to another waitress her preeminent respectability and discretion.Mrs.Grundy drew the line at spirits, but allowed that it was quite proper for a clean young girl to drink beer and to go into a public house to drink it.

Not only is this beer unfit for the people to drink it, but too often the men and women are unfit to drink it.On the other hand, it is their very unfitness that drives them to drink it.Ill-fed, suffering from innutrition and the evil effects of overcrowding and squalor, their constitutions develop a morbid craving for the drink, just as the sickly stomach of the over-strung Manchester factory operative hankers after excessive quantities of pickles and similar weird foods.Unhealthy working and living engenders unhealthy appetites and desires.Man cannot be worked worse than a horse is worked, and be housed and fed as a pig is housed and fed, and at the same time have clean and wholesome ideals and aspirations.

As home-life vanishes, the public house appears.Not only do men and women abnormally crave drink, who are overworked, exhausted, suffering from deranged stomachs and bad sanitation, and deadened by the ugliness and monotony of existence; but the gregarious men and women who have no home-life flee to the bright and clattering public house in a vain attempt to express their gregariousness.And when a family is housed in one small room, home-life is impossible.

A brief examination of such a dwelling will serve to bring to light one important cause of drunkenness.Here the family arises in the morning, dresses, and makes its toilet, father, mother, sons, and daughters, and in the same room, shoulder to shoulder (for the room is small), the wife and mother cooks the breakfast.And in the same room, heavy and sickening with the exhalations of their packed bodies throughout the night, that breakfast is eaten.The father goes to work, the elder children go to school or on to the street, and the mother remains with her crawling, toddling youngsters to do her housework- still in the same room.Here she washes the clothes, filling the pent space with soapsuds and the smell of dirty clothes, and overhead she hangs the wet linen to dry.

Here, in the evening, amid the manifold smells of the day, the family goes to its virtuous couch.That is to say, as many as possible pile into the one bed (if bed they have), and the surplus turns in on the floor.And this is the round of their existence, month after month, year after year, for they never get a vacation save when they are evicted.When a child dies, and some are always bound to die since fifty-five per cent of the East End children die before they are five years old, the body is laid out in the same room.And if they are very poor, it is kept for some time until they can bury it.During the day it lies on the bed; during the night, when the living take the bed, the dead occupies the table, from which, in the morning, when the dead is put back into the bed, they eat their breakfast.Sometimes the body is placed on the shelf which serves as pantry for their food.

Only a couple of weeks ago, an East End woman was in trouble, because, in this fashion, being unable to bury it, she had kept her dead child three weeks.

Now such a room as I have described, is not home but horror; and the men and women who flee away from it to the public house are to be pitied, not blamed.There are 300,000 people in London, divided into families that live in single rooms, while there are 900,000 who are illegally housed according to the Public Health Act of 1891- a respectable recruiting ground for the drink traffic.

Then there are the insecurity of happiness, the precariousness of existence, the well-founded fear of the future- potent factors in driving people to drink.Wretchedness squirms for alleviation, and in the public house its pain is eased and forgetfulness is obtained.

It is unhealthy.Certainly it is, but everything else about their lives is unhealthy, while this brings the oblivion that nothing else in their lives can bring.It even exalts them, and makes them feel that they are finer and better, though at the same time it drags them down and makes them more beastly than ever.For the unfortunate man or woman, it is a race between miseries that ends with death.