We went together to the pawnbroker's, then to the rag-market, and the little man trotted home with an armful of old boots and shoes, some without soles, some without uppers; all, as I should have thought, picked out of dust-bins and rubbish heaps, his sunken eyes sparkling with eagerness and renovated hope. I looked in upon him about three weeks later. The family were sitting round a well provided tea-table, close to a glowing fire, the cheeks of the children smeared with jam, and the little cobbler hammering away at his last, too busy to partake of the bowl of hot tea which his wife had placed beside him.
The same sort of treatment was sometimes very successful with a skilful workman - like a carpenter, for instance. Here a double purpose might be served. Nothing more common in Bethnal Green than broken looms, and consequent disaster.
There you had the ready-made job for the reinstated carpenter; and good could be done in a small way, at very little cost. Of coarse much discretion is needed; still, the Scripture readers or the relieving officers would know the characters of the destitute, and the visitor himself would soon learn to discriminate.
A system similar to this was the basis of the aid rendered by the Royal Society for the Assistance of Discharged Prisoners, which was started by my friend, Mr. Whitbread, the present owner of Southill, and which I joined in its early days at his instigation. The earnings of the prisoner were handed over by the gaols to the Society, and the Society employed them for his advantage - always, in the case of an artisan, by supplying him with the needful implements of his trade.
But relief in which the pauper has no productive share, of which he is but a mere consumer, is of no avail.
One cannot but think that if instead of the selfish principles which govern our trades-unions, and which are driving their industries out of the country, trade-schools could be provided - such, for instance, as the cheap carving schools to be met with in many parts of Germany and the Tyrol - much might be done to help the bread-earners. Why could not schools be organised for the instruction of shoemakers, tailors, carpenters, smiths of all kinds, and the scores of other trades which in former days were learnt by compulsory apprenticeship? Under our present system of education the greater part of what the poor man's children learn is clean forgotten in a few years; and if not, serves mainly to create and foster discontent, which vents itself in a passion for mass-meetings and the fuliginous oratory of our Hyde Parks.
The emigration scheme for poor-law children as advocated by Mrs. Close is the most promising, in its way, yet brought before the public, and is deserving of every support.
In the absence of any such projects as these, the hopelessness of the task, and the depressing effect of the contact with much wretchedness, wore me out. I had a nursery of my own, and was not justified in risking infectious diseases. A saint would have been more heroic, and could besides have promised that sweetest of consolations to suffering millions - the compensation of Eternal Happiness.
I could not give them even hope, for I had none to spare.
The root-evil I felt to be the overcrowding due to the reckless intercourse of the sexes; and what had Providence to do with a law of Nature, obedience to which entailed unspeakable misery?
