Toronto by Gaslight: The Night Hawks of a Great City: As Seen by the Reporters of "The Toronto News"Toronto News
History
Toronto by Gaslight: The Night Hawks of a Great City: As Seen by the Reporters of "The Toronto News"
Toronto News
Toronto (Ont.) -- Description and travel
For the purpose of getting the views of a class of gentlemen whose
profession brings them frequently in contact with the vicious classes of
our city, NEWS reporters waited on several clergymen. Those selected were
men who were known not to be shirkers from this unpleasant portion of a
pastor’s duties. The result will be found below.
A CITY MISSIONARY’S EXPERIENCES.
An evangelist and city missionary of some years experience in Toronto
was interviewed. “You cannot,” he said “tell what the Toronto slums are
like, seeing them by day light. You enter a tenement house on Duchess
or Lombard streets in the forenoon or at noon. All looks quiet enough.
The women, generally of middle age, are standing at the door exchanging
gossip with their neighbors. Some appearance of household work has
been going on, and as noon approaches there is an odor of onion stew
or fried pork. We enter. You are always safe in these regions when
accompanied by a policeman or a reporter or a city missionary, but
your visit would be much more favorably received if your escort be of
either of the two latter classes. The furniture of the living room is of
the cheapest and simplest description of second-hand ware, the tables
are battered and sodden with the smear of innumerable drinking bouts.
The chairs are evidently more often used as missiles propelled through
the air by hostile hands than for the peaceful purpose of resting the
human body. The crazy old windows are grimy with dirt; grimy are the
floors, the ceilings, the ricketty stairways leading to unknown dens
above. Almost all of these tenement houses are a perfect baby-burrow of
children, untaught, unwashed, unkempt, enfants perdus of the gutter,
the protoplasm out of which the great Sin and the yet greater Misery
of our city is certain to shape itself in the future! Presently,
three or four able-bodied young men come in from what they call work.
A sinister-looking young woman in frowsy dress, the cut across her
whisky-sodden face telling its tale of last night’s revel, joins the
group. The eldest child is sent with a cracked jug for beer to the corner
saloon. As a rule, these people fare considerably better than the poorer
ones among the respectable sober working people; they live from hand to
mouth; the only text in the gospel which they obey implicitly being “Let
the morrow take thought for itself.” When they are not starving they are
generally well supplied with bread, meat, tea and vegetables; nor are
such luxuries as pies and cake unknown to them, to say nothing of malt or
spirituous liquor, though, as a rule, the drinking sets in most heavily
at night. At about 10 p.m. on Saturday or Sunday to see one of these
establishments at full blast! Then
DRINK REIGNS UNCONTROLLED.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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