THE POOR CHILDREN OF LONDON.

369

get around facts, however distasteful they may prove to the Aristocracy of the Empire, whose chief organ it has always been. In the volume for 1847, the Review in speaking of the poor children of London:

"Every one, who walks the streets of the metropolis, must daily observe several members of the tribe-bold, and pert, and dirty as London sparrows, but pale, feeble and sadly inferior to them in plumpness of outline. Their business, or pretended business, seems to vary with the locality. At the West End they deal in lucifer matches, audaciously beg, or tell a touching tale of woe. Pass on to the central part of the town-to Holborn or the Strand, and the regions adjacent to them-and you will find the numbers very greatly increased; a few are pursuing the avocations above mentioned of their more Corinthian fellows; many are spanning the gutters with their legs, and dabbling with earnestness in the latest accumulation of nastiness; while others, in squalid and half-naked groups, squat at the entrances of the narrow fetid courts and alleys, that lie concealed behind the deceptive frontages of our larger thoroughfares. Whitechapel and Spitalfields, teem with them like an ant's nest; but it is in Lambeth and Westminster, that we find the most flagrant traces of their swarming activity. There the foul and dismal passages are thronged with children of both sexes, and of every age from three to thirteen. Though wan and haggard, they are singularly vivacious, and engaged in every sort of occupation but that which would be beneficial to themselves and creditable to the neighborhood. Their appearance is wild; the matted hair, the disgusting filth, that renders necessary a closer inspection, before the flesh can be discerned between the rags which hang about it, and the barbarian freedom from all superintendence and restraint, fill the mind of a novice in these things, with perplexity and dismay. Visit these regions in the summer, and you are overwhelmed by the exhalations; visit them in the winter, and you are shocked by the spectacle of hundreds shivering in apparel that would be scanty in the tropics; many are all but naked; those that are clothed are grotesque; the trousers, where they have them, seldom pass the knee; the coat tails very frequently trail below the heels. In this guise, they run about the streets and line the banks of the river at low water, seeking coals, sticks, corks, for nothing comes amiss as treasure trove. Screams of delight burst occasionally from the crowds, and leave the passer by, if he be in a contemplative mood, to wonder and rejoice that moral and physical degradation has not yet broken every spring of their youthful energies.

.....

"A large proportion of those who dwell in the capital" (and the writer might have added, in all the larger towns) "of the British empire, are crammed into regions of filth and darkness, the ancient but not solitary reign of newts and toads.

"Here are the receptacles of the species we investigate; here they are spawned, and here they perish! Can their state be a matter of wonder! We have penetrated alleys terminating in a cul-de-sac, long and narrow like a tobacco pipe, where air and sunshine were never known. On one side rose walls several feet in height, blackened with damp and slime; on the other side stood the dwellings still more revolting, while the breadth of the wet and bestrewed passage would by no means allow us the full expansion of our arms! We have waited at the entrance of another of similar character and dimensions, but forbidden by the force and pungency of the odors to examine its recesses. The novelty of a visit from persons clad like gentlemen, gave the hope that we were official; and several women, haggard, rough and exasperated, surrounded us at once, imploring us to order the removal of the filth, which had poisoned their tencments, and to grant them a supply of water, from which they had been debarred for many days. Pass to another district; you may find it less confined, but there you will see flowing before each hovel, and within a few feet of it, a broad, black, uncovered drain, exhaling at every point the most unwholesome vapors. If there be not a drain, there is a stagnant pool: touch either with your stick, and the mephitic mass will yield up its poisonous gas like the coruscations of soda water.

"The children sit along these depositories of death, or roam through the retired courts, in

370

THE WORK OF THE CITY MISSION.

which the abomination of years has been suffered to accumulate. Here reigns a melancholy silence, seldom broken, but by an irritated scold or a pugnacious drunkard. The pale, discolored faces of the inhabitants, their shrivelled forms, their abandoned exterior, recall the living skeletons of the Pontine Marshes, and sufficiently attest the presence of a secret agency, hostile to every physical and moral improvement of the human race.

"The interior of the dwellings is in strict keeping; the smaller space of the apartments increasing, of course, the evils that prevail without-damp, darkness, dirt and foul air. Many are wholly destitute of furniture; many contain nothing except a table and a chair; some few have a common bed for all ages and both sexes; but a large proportion of the denizens of these regions lie on a heap of rags more nasty than the floor itself. Happy is the family that can boast of a single room to itself, and in that room, a dry corner. . . . . .

"The children that survive the noxious influences and awful neglect, are thrown as soon as they can crawl, to scramble in the gutter, and leave their parents to amusement or busi

ness......

"The 'duris urgens in rebus egestas' stimulates these independent urchins; and at an age when the children of the wealthy would still be in leading strings, they are off, singly or in parties, to beg, borrow, steal and exercise all the cunning that want and love of evil can stir up in a reckless race. . . . . .

"They receive no education, religious or secular; they are subjected to no restraint of any sort; never do they hear the word of advice or the accent of kindness; the notions that exist in the minds of ordinary persons have no place in theirs; having nothing exclusively of their own, they seem to think such, in fact, the true position of society; and helping themselves without scruple to the goods of others, they can never recognise, when convicted before a magistrate, the justice of a sentence, which punishes them for having done little or more than was indispensable to their existence."

In 1845, out of 59,123 persons taken into custody, 15,263 could neither read nor write, while of the whole number, 14,887, of both sexes, were under 20 years of age.

It is universally agreed that this is a fair picture, not only of London, but of all the large towns.

VII.

HE" City Mission," employing several hundred visitors— Established Church and Dissenters alike-expend over £20,000 annually, and they have done a noble work. But it has only been able to remove a few of the mole-hills; the black mountain is still standing-untouched-undisturbed.

The Established Church does very little for the poor of Britain. Take a single statement in "The City Mission Magazine," January, 1848, concerning the parish of St. Pancras, London, where the Church had put forth far more than an average of exertion. More than 100,000 inhabitants of that parish alone had no sittings in church or chapel. Even these were not half filled; and a majority of all the poor children in the parish were growing up in sottish ignorance of everything but crime. The lamentable fact is everywhere evi

GROWTH OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH.

371

dent, that the Church is kept up for the priests, and not the priests for the Church. The poor feel this, and everywhere in all parts of England, when spoken to on the subject, the same answer comes back: "Your Church was made for the rich, not for people like us." Poor people don't go to any churches whose ministers never go to them. Consequently, you find all Catholic churches crowded. Among many other writers who have written well on this point, Mr. Kay has admirably explained the rapid growth of the Catholic Church in England, during the last thirty or forty years.*

*He says of the Clergy of the Establishment: "They are educated gentlemen; brought up in comfortable homes, and in luxurious Universities: trained in the most splendid halls of learning in the world, in company with the sons of the highest, richest and most influential people of the country; and accustomed to associate with the most literary, refined and luxurious classes in the land. Now, however well their origin, education and manners fit them to be the patterns and advisers of the middle classes, to be the foci of a high order of civilization in their respective districts, and to carry the politeness of the metropolis into the most remote corners and into the most secluded nooks of the Island, it undoubtedly often unfits them for the difficult task of visiting the poor in the low haunts of our crowded towns. No one, but those who have actually tried the experiment, can imagine how revolting it is to the senses of a refined man, to spend hours or even minutes in the foul retreats of the most degraded of our town poor. The atmosphere of the rooms, where two, three, or four families often live together in unwashed filth, and with scarce any ventilation; the manners, habits, food and conversation of these people; the effluvia from their beds, where often as many as six individuals, parents and children, crowd in together, render these dens of misery intolerable to a man of refined habits.

The Roman Church is much wiser than the English in this respect. It selects a great part of its priests from the poorest classes of society, and educates them gratuitously in great simplicity of habits. The consequence is, that they feel no difficulty in mingling with the poor. Many of them are not of refined habits themselves, and are not therefore disgusted at want of refinement in others. They understand perfectly what are the thoughts, feelings and habits of the poor. They know how to suit their demeanor, conversation, teaching and actions, so as to make the poor quite at ease with them. They do not feel the disgust, which a more refined man cannot help feeling, in being obliged to enter the low haunts of the back streets and alleys.

"It is singular to observe how the priests of Romanist countries abroad associate with the poor. I have often seen them with the peasants in their carts

372

RELIGIOUS CENSUS OF MD.CCC.LI.

VIII.

SOME

JOME valuable statistics on the religious condition of the population of London appeared in the British Quarterly Review of the present year, January, 1866. It says:

"The Religious Census of 1851 was an epoch in the history of religion in England. The increase of sittings in the Established Church, from 1801 to 1851, was only 1,248,634-that of all other denominations was 3,927,313-or 40.7 per cent., and Established Church 30 per cent. This information for another decade would have been invaluable. But ecclesiastical jealousy and exclusiveness were aroused by the revelations

along the roads, eating with them in their houses, sitting with them in the village inns, mingling with them in their village festivals, and yet always preserving their authority. Besides this, the spectacles of the Romanist worship are much more attractive to the less educated masses, than the less imaginative forms of Protestant worship, and the services of the Roman Church are shorter and much more numerous than those of the English. These causes fill the Romanist churches, both abroad and in our manufacturing districts, on the Sundays, and at the early matins of the weekdays, with crowds of poor, who go there to receive the blessing of their priests, to hear prayers put up which they be lieve to be for blessings, although they do not understand them, and to see the glittering spectacle of a Romanist worship exhibited before them.

It behooves us to consider these things, if the English Church is not willing to give up the poor to the care of the Romanist Priests. There are significant facts before us, if we would but see them. Within the last few years, splendid Romanist churches, full of free sittings, have been springing up in the crowded districts of England, and especially in the manufacturing towns of the north. In Manchester alone, three beautiful Romanist churches, and one magnificent Romanist cathedral-now by far the finest building in the town-have been erected within the last twelve years. The priests seem to be able to obtain as much money as they require; and spare no pains to attract the people. Their exertions amongst the poorest of the operatives, and in the lowest of their haunts, are praiseworthy in the extreme. They know that it is infinitely more important to have priests than churches. When they build a church, therefore, they generally attach to it, not one, but several, and often many priests, some of them chosen from the lowest classes of the community, and educated expressly for their labors. In the manufacturing districts of England, a large handsome building of the same style of architecture as the church, and capable of serving as the dwelling-house of ten or twelve priests, is generally attached to each of the churches.

THE CHURCH SUPPRESSES THE FACTS.

373

of Mr. Horace Mann's masterly Report. Notwithstanding the willingness of Nonconformists again to face the same ordeal, and in spite of the anxious desire of all who have at heart the extension of Evangelical religion to ascertain the advance made during the interval, and the extent of spiritual destitution still to be met, the fiat went forth that the Religious Census of 1851 was not to be repeated." The Reviewer states that Lord Palmerston's government acted, it was believed, under the advice of high church dignitaries, etc.

The loss is made up by the Nonconformists. "The Church now makes provision for only 17 per cent. of the 3,000,000 of metropolitan population." This voluntary census was aided. and sanctioned by the Bishops of London and Manchester.

Mr. Mann showed that in 1851 48 per cent. of the whole religious resources of England and Wales was provided by

"These churches and priest houses are situated in the districts most densely populated with the poorest of the operative classes, and near their lowest haunts. The Church and its servants, both arrayed and surrounded with all the ornaments and ceremonials of a very richly and beautifully adorned form of worship, are placed close to the doors of the worst and most degraded of the population. The churches are built with the greatest possible taste, both as regards their exteriors and their interiors, and are as splendidly ornamented, as beautifully painted, as well warmed and cleaned, and as comfortable, as they could be, if they had been intended for the use of the richest classes in the land: while nearly all the sittings in them are free to the humblest of the people.

"When the poor enter, they find themselves treated in the Temple of their God with the same respect as the richest; while all their senses are gratified in the highest degree. When to all this is added the fact, that the priests carry out an indefatigable and unostentatious system of visitation, it is not a matter of surprise that they should be making many converts among our people.

"I have been assured by clergymen of Lancashire, who are equally removed above bigotry and indifference, and who are themselves the most earnest laborers among the poor, that the progress of Romanism throughout the manufacturing districts is very extraordinary.

"If we remember that vast numbers of the poor of our towns cannot read or write a word, have never entered one of our churches, and have never heard the doctrines of Christianity; and that of the thousands of criminals who are con victed at our sessions and assizes, very few have ever received any instruction whatever, it certainly does behoove us to stir ourselves."