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.
“Half-past eleven on Friday morning in a back street in the most
poverty-stricken and most largely relieved district in Canning Town. A
group of women wait around the gates of a chapel, from which doles are
being issued. Dirty, ragged and untidy, they certainly are, but
hunger-stricken--No! Their children playing in the roadway near by are
ill-clad, filthy, and in many cases bare-footed, and do show signs of
under-feeding, but not the mothers.
These are the wives of the habitual Unemployed seeking relief.
The curious stranger notices that some of the women go from the relief
station to the public-houses. Let us look inside a few of these
establishments. In a side bar of the first place we enter, we find
eleven women, exactly of the same type as those soliciting charity
without. One of them carries a recently-born baby in her arms, and
another has a little girl two years old clinging to her apron. Each
woman has a glass in front of her. Some of them have been here since
half-past nine in the morning, and will stay for hours yet. In the
next drinking shop is a party of nine, in the next but two, while in
the last of all we find seven. Now one rises to go out, for her hour
has come to beg for aid from school or parson or Unemployed fund.
An hour later we can see the husbands of these women amusing
themselves at the street corner higher up. Five bookmakers’ touts are
busy among them at one cross roads alone.
At this time, when we are threatened with a new Unemployed agitation,
it is as well that the causes of much of the distress in some of the
Unemployed areas should be understood. For several years the public
has tried to deal with the sufferings of the very poor by sentimental
means. Each winter has brought increase of relief, and each increase
of relief has helped to render more permanent the problem it has set
about to cure.
We have now in one district alone, a large number of people, totalling
many thousands, incapable of regular work and unwilling to attempt it.
They have been taught to lean on charity to aid them, and they have
proved themselves apt pupils. Their homes will, as a rule, for sheer
uncleanliness, bear comparison with the dwelling of an Australian
aborigine. Their children are systematically made untidy, and are
given a neglected air in order more successfully to extort outside
aid. Parental love is so dead that, in very many cases, the mothers
will sell the boots given to their children in order to buy gin.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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