London (England) -- Social conditions; Poor -- England -- London
The people who try to help, who gather up the Ghetto children and send
them away on a day’s outing to the country, believe that not very many
children reach the age of ten without having had at least one day
there. Of this, a writer says: “The mental change caused by one day so
spent must not be undervalued. Whatever the circumstances, the children
learn the meaning of fields and woods, so that descriptions of country
scenery in the books they read, which before conveyed no impression,
become now intelligible.”
One day in the fields and woods, if they are lucky enough to be picked
up by the people who try to help! And they are being born faster every
day than they can be carted off to the fields and woods for the one day
in their lives. One day! In all their lives, one day! And for the rest
of the days, as the boy told a certain bishop, “At ten we ’ops the wag;
at thirteen we nicks things; an’ at sixteen we bashes the copper.”
Which is to say, at ten they play truant, at thirteen steal, and at
sixteen are sufficiently developed hooligans to smash the policemen.
The Rev. J. Cartmel Robinson tells of a boy and girl of his parish who
set out to walk to the forest. They walked and walked through the
never-ending streets, expecting always to see it by-and-by; until they
sat down at last, faint and despairing, and were rescued by a kind
woman who brought them back. Evidently they had been overlooked by the
people who try to help.
The same gentleman is authority for the statement that in a street in
Hoxton (a district of the vast East End), over seven hundred children,
between five and thirteen years, live in eighty small houses. And he
adds: “It is because London has largely shut her children in a maze of
streets and houses and robbed them of their rightful inheritance in sky
and field and brook, that they grow up to be men and women physically
unfit.”
He tells of a member of his congregation who let a basement room to a
married couple. “They said they had two children; when they got
possession it turned out that they had four. After a while a fifth
appeared, and the landlord gave them notice to quit. They paid no
attention to it. Then the sanitary inspector who has to wink at the law
so often, came in and threatened my friend with legal proceedings. He
pleaded that he could not get them out. They pleaded that nobody would
have them with so many children at a rental within their means, which
is one of the commonest complaints of the poor, by-the-bye. What was to
be done? The landlord was between two millstones. Finally he applied to
the magistrate, who sent up an officer to inquire into the case. Since
that time about twenty days have elapsed, and nothing has yet been
done. Is this a singular case? By no means; it is quite common.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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