Agricultural colonies; Poor -- Great Britain; Salvation Army; Unemployed -- Great Britain
Carrying out the same idea I come to the problem of the waste
commodities of the towns, and we will take this as an earnest of the
working out of the general principle. In the villages there is very
little waste. The sewage is applied directly to the land, and so
becomes a source of wealth instead of being emptied into great
subterranean reservoirs, to generate poisonous gases, which by a most
ingenious arrangement, are then poured forth into the very heart of our
dwellings, as is the case in the great cities. Neither is there any
waste of broken victuals. The villager has his pig or his poultry, or
if he has not a pig his neighbour has one, and the collection of broken
victuals is conducted as regularly as the delivery of the post. And as
it is with broken victuals, so it is with rags and bones, and old iron,
and all the debris of a household. When I was a boy one of the most
familiar figures in the streets of a country town was the man, who,
with his small hand-barrow or donkey-cart, made a regular patrol
through all the streets once a week, collecting rags, bones, and all
other waste materials, buying the same from the juveniles who collected
them in specie, not of Her Majesty's current coin, but of common
sweetmeats, known as "claggum" or "taffy." When the tootling of his
familiar horn was heard the children would bring out their stores, and
trade as best they could with the itinerant merchant, with the result
that the closets which in our towns to-day have become the receptacles
of all kinds of, disused lumber were kept then swept and garnished.
Now, what I want to know is why can we not establish on a scale
commensurate with our extended needs the rag-and-bone industry in all
our great towns? That there is sufficient to pay for the collection is,
I think, indisputable. If it paid in a small North-country town or
Midland village, why would it not pay much better in an area where the
houses stand more closely together, and where luxurious living and
thriftless habits have so increased that there must be proportionately
far more breakage, more waste, and, therefore, more collectable matter
than in the rural districts? In looking over the waste of London it has
occurred to me that in the debris of our households there is sufficient
food, it utilised, to feed many of the starving poor, and to employ
some thousands of them in its collection, and, in addition, largely to
assist the general scheme. What I propose would be to go to work on
something like the following plan:-
London would be divided into districts, beginning with that portion of
it most likely to furnish the largest supplies of what would be worth
collection. Two men, or a man and a boy, would be told of for this
purpose to this district.
Households would be requested to allow a receptacle to be placed in
some convenient spot in which the servants could deposit the waste
food, and a sack of some description would also be supplied for the
paper, rags, &c.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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