第32章 IS THERE NO HELP?(3)

F.K.W.;baker.Been board-carrying to-day,earned one shilling,Hours 9till 5.I've been on this kind of life six years.Used to work in a bakery,but had congestion of the brain,and couldn't stand the heat.I've been in about every Casual Ward in England.They treat men too harshly.Have to work very hard,too.Has had to work whilst really unfit.At Peckham (known as Camberwell)Union,was quite unable to do it through weakness,and appealed to the doctor,who,taking the part of the other officials,as usual,refused to allow him to forego the work.Cheeked the doctor,telling him he didn't understand his work;result,got three days'imprisonment.Before going to a Casual Ward at all,I spent seven consecutive nights on the Embankment,and at last went to the Ward.

The result of the deliberate policy of making the night refuge for the unemployed labourer as disagreeable as possible,and of placing as many obstacles as possible in the way of his finding work the following day,is,no doubt,to minimise the number of Casuals,and without question succeeds.In the whole of London the number of Casuals in the wards at night is only 1,136.That is to say,the conditions which are imposed are so severe,that the majority of the Out-of-Works prefer to sleep in the open air,taking their chance of the inclemency and mutability of our English weather,rather than go through the experience of the Casual Ward.

It seems to me that such a mode of coping with distress does not so much meet the difficulty as evade it.It is obvious that an apparatus,which only provides for 1,136persons per night,is utterly unable to deal with the numbers of the homeless Out-of-Works.But if by some miracle we could use the Casual Wards as a means of providing for all those who are seeking work from day to day,without a place in which to lay their heads,save the kerbstone of the pavement or the back of a seat on the Embankment,they would utterly fail to have any appreciable effect upon the mass of human misery with which we have to deal.

For this reason;the administration of the Casual Wards is mechanical,perfunctory,and formal.Each of the Casuals is to the Officer in Charge merely one Casual the more.There is no attempt whatever to do more than provide for them merely the indispensable requisites of existence.There has never been any attempt to treat them as human beings,to deal with them as individuals,to appeal to their hearts,to help them on their legs again.They are simply units,no more thought of and cared for than if they were so many coffee beans passing through a coffee mill;and as the net result of all my experience and observation of men and things,I must assert unhesitatingly that anything which dehumanises the individual,anything which treats a man as if he were only a number of a series or a cog in a wheel,without any regard to the character,the aspirations,the temptations,and the idiosyncrasies of the man,must utterly fail as a remedial agency.

The Casual Ward,at the best,is merely a squalid resting place for the Casual in his downward career.It anything is to be done for these men,it must be done by other agents than those which prevail in the administration of the Poor Laws.

The second method in which Society endeavours to do its duty to the lapsed masses is by the miscellaneous and heterogeneous efforts which are clubbed together under the generic head of Charity.Far be it from me to say one word in disparagement of any effort that is prompted by a sincere desire to alleviate the misery of our fellow creatures,but the most charitable are those who most deplore the utter failure which has,up till now,attended all their efforts to do more than temporarily alleviate pain,or effect an occasional improvement in the condition of individuals.

There are many institutions,very excellent in their way,without which it is difficult to see how society could get on at all,but when they have done their best there still remains this great and appalling mass of human misery on our hands,a perfect quagmire of Human Sludge.

They may ladle out individuals here and there,but to drain the whole bog is an effort which seems to be beyond the imagination of most of those who spend their lives in philanthropic work.It is no doubt better than nothing to take the individual and feed him from day to day,to bandage up his wounds and heal his diseases;but you may go on doing that for ever,if you do not do more than that;and the worst of it is that all authorities agree that if you only do that you will probably increase the evil with which you are attempting to deal,and that you had much better let the whole thing alone.

There is at present no attempt at Concerted Action.Each one deals with the case immediately before him,and the result is what might be expected;there is a great expenditure,but the gains are,alas!very small.The fact,however,that so much is subscribed for the temporary relief and the mere alleviation of distress justifies my confidence that if a Practical Scheme of dealing with this misery in a permanent,comprehensive fashion be discovered,there will be no lack of the sinews of war.It is well,no doubt,sometimes to administer an anaesthetic,but the Cure of the Patient is worth ever so much more,and the latter is the object which we must constantly set before us in approaching this problem.