Let but a morsel of wood—a little splinter of deal, a curl of carpenter’s shaving—lie in Fleet Street, and it draws to it the wretched human beasts as surely as the offal draws the beast of the desert to the camp. A morsel of wood in the streets that are paved with gold!
It is so valuable. Women snatch it up and roll it in their aprons, clasping it tightly, lest it should somehow disappear. Prowling about from street to street, mile after mile, they fill their aprons with these precious splinters of deal, for to those who are poor fuel is as life itself.
Even the wealthy, if they have once been ill, especially of blood-thinning diseases (as rheumatism), sometimes say they would rather go without food than coal. Rather emptiness than chill.
These women know where there are hoardings erected by builders, where shopfronts are being rebuilt, where fires have taken place, where alterations are proceeding; they know them as the birds know the places where they are likely to find food, and visit them day by day for the scraps of wood and splinters that drop on the pavement.
Or they send their children, ragged urchins, battling for a knot of pine-wood.
The terror of frost to these creatures is great indeed. Frost is the King of Terrors to them—not Death; they sleep and live with death constantly, the dead frequently in the room with the living, and with the unborn that is near birth.
Alere’s ten pounds helped them. The drunkard’s wife knew that Flamma, the drinker, would certainly give her the silver in his pocket.
The ragged urchins, battling for a knot of pine-wood, knew that they could charm the pennies and the threepenny bits out of his waistcoat; the baked potatoes and the roasted chestnuts looked so nice on the street stove.
Wretched girls whose power of tempting had gone, and with it their means of subsistence, begged, and not in vain, of shaky Alere Flamma. There are many of these wretches in Fleet Street. There is no romance about them to attract the charity of the world.
Once a flower-girl, selling flowers without a licence in the street, was charged by the police. How this harshness to the flower-girl—the human representation of Flora—roused up sentiment in her behalf!
But not every starving girl has the fortune to rouse up sentiment and to be fed. Their faces disfigured with eruptions, their thin shoulders, their dry, disordered hair—hair never looks nice unless soft with its natural oil—their dingy complexions, their threadbare shawls, tempt no one. They cannot please, therefore they must starve.
The good turn from them with horror—Are they not sin made manifest? The trembling hand of Alere fed them.
Because the boys bawl do you suppose they are happy? It is curious that people should associate noise with a full stomach. The shoeblack boys, the boys that are gathered into institutions and training ships, are expected to bawl and shout their loudest at the annual fêtes when visitors are present. Your bishops and deans forthwith feel assured that their lives are consequently joyous.
Why then do they set fire to training ships? Why do they break out of reformatory institutions? Bawling is not necessarily happiness. Yet fatuous fools are content if only they can hear a good uproar of bawling.
I have never walked up Fleet Street and the Strand yet without seeing a starving woman and child. The children are indeed dreadful; they run unguarded and unwatched out of the side courts into the broader and more lively Strand—the ceaseless world pushes past—they play on the pavement unregarded. Hatless, shoeless, bound about with rags, their faces white and scarred with nameless disease, their eyes bleared, their hair dirty; little things, such as in happy homes are sometimes set on the table to see how they look.
How can people pass without seeing them?
Alere saw them, and his hand went to his waistcoat pocket.
The rich folk round about this great Babylon of Misery, where cruel Want sits on the Seven Hills—make a cartoon of that!—the rich folk who receive hundreds on the turn of a stock, who go to the Bank of England on dividend days—how easily the well-oiled doors swing open for them!—who dwell in ease and luxury at Sydenham, at Norwood, at Surbiton, at Streatham, at Brighton, at Seven-oaks, wherever there is pure air, have distinguished themselves lately in the giving of alms, ordained by the Lord whom they kneel before each Sunday, clad in silk, scarlet, and fine linen, in their cushioned pews.
They have established Homes for Lost Dogs and Homes for Lost Cats, neither of which are such nuisances as human beings.
In the dog institution they have set up an apparatus specially designed by one of the leading scientific men of the age. The dogs that are not claimed in a certain time, or that have become diseased—like the human nuisances—are put into this apparatus, into a comfortable sort of chamber, to gnaw their last bone. By-and-by, a scientific vapour enters the chamber, and breathing this, the animal falls calmly to death, painlessly poisoned in peace.
Seven thousand dogs were thus happily chloroformed “into eternity” in one season. Jubilant congratulations were exchanged at the success of the apparatus. Better than shooting, drowning, hanging, vivisection, or starvation!
Let a dog die in peace. Is not this an age of humanity indeed? To sell all you have and give to the poor was nothing compared to this. We have progressed since Anno Domini I. We know better how to do it now.
Alere did not seem to trouble himself much about the dogs; he saw so much of the human nuisances.
What a capital idea it would be to set up an apparatus like this in the workhouses and in conjunction with the hospitals!
Do you know, thoughtless, happy maiden, singing all the day, that one out of every five people who die in London, die in the workhouse or the hospital?
Eighty-two thousand people died in London in 1882,
