394

FILTHY CELLARS IN LIVERPOOL.

"It may be stated, that the whole of the cellar-population of the parish (upwards of 20,000), are absolutely without any place of deposit for their refuse matter. In some instances, the fluid contents of the ash-pits of the houses above ooze through into these cellar-houses, filling them with pestilential vapors, and rendering it necessary to dig wells to receive it, in order to prevent the inhabitants being inundated. One of these wells, 4 feet deep, filled with this stinking fluid, was found in one cellar under the bed where the family slept."

In what other part of the world, civilized or barbarous, can twenty per cent. of the population be found in such a condition as in the commercial emporium of the British Empire?

Liverpool and its cellars are also described (in the Report of the Health of Towns' Commission, vol. I. p. 277) by Mr. Holme: "The melancholy facts elicited by previous inquiries, clearly show that Liverpool contains a multitude of inhabited cellars, close and damp, with no drain, nor any convenience; and these pest-houses are constantly filled with fever. Some time ago, I visited a poor woman in distress, the wife of a laboring man; she had been confined only a few days, and herself and infant were lying on straw in a vault, through the outer cellar, with a clay floor, impervious to water. There was no light or ventilation in it, and the air was dreadful. I had to walk on bricks across the floor to reach her bed-side, as the floor itself was flooded with stagnant water. This is by no means an extraordinary case, for I have witnessed scenes equally wretched; and it is only necessary to go into Crosby Street, Freemason's Row, and many cross streets out of Vauxhall Road, to find hordes of poor creatures living in cellars, which are almost as bad and offensive as charnel-houses. In Freemason's Row I found, about two years ago, a court of houses, the floors of which were below the public street, and the area of the whole court was a floating mass of putrified animal and vegetable matter, so dreadfully offensive that I was obliged to make a precipitate retreat. Yet the whole of the houses were inhabited."

PAINFUL AND INCREDIBLE DEGRADATION.

XXII.

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L

EST his readers should accuse him of selecting isolated cases, from which he draws such fearful conclusions, Mr. Kay declares, that the further he examined, the more painful, disgusting and incredible the tale became :

"We see on every hand stately palaces, to which no country in the world offers any parallel. The houses of our rich are more gorgeous and more luxurious than those of any other land. Every clime is ransacked to adorn or furnish them. The soft carpets, the heavy rich curtains, the luxuriously easy couches, the beds of down, the services of plate, the numerous servants, the splendid equipages, and all the expensive objects of literature, science and the arts, which crowd the palaces of England, form but items in an ensemble of refinement and magnificence which was never imagined or approached in all the splendor of the ancient empires.

"But look beneath all this display and luxury, and what do we see there? A pauperised and suffering people.

"To maintain show, we have degraded the masses until we have created an evil so vast that we now despair of ever finding a remedy. The Irish poor have drunk the dregs of the cup of misery, and are hardly kept from revolution by the strong arm of the soldiers and police; while the English poor are only saved from despair and its dread consequences by the annual expenditure of MANY MILLIONS in relief. which our own neglect and misgovernment have rendered necessary.

"The dwellings of the poor in the back streets and alleys of our towns are as wretched as they are degrading. The inquiries made in 1849, during the spread of the cholera, and those made in late years by the City Mission, by the correspondents of the Morning Chronicle and by private individuals, have disclosed a state of things which would disgrace a country of barbarians. Even leaving out of consideration the cellar-dwellings and the 'lodging-houses,' which I have mentioned above, the state of many of the houses in the back streets and alleys is wretched in the extreme. The amount of dwelling room occupied by many of the families is miserably small. Even in the manufacturing towns of the North, where the houses of the operatives are generally much superior to the wretched dwellings of the poor in the larger towns of the South of England, even there the accommodation afforded in a great part of the houses is miserable. Great numbers have only one bedroom for the whole family, whose father, mother, brothers and sisters all sleep together, often in the same bed.

"Many even of the houses most recently built for operatives in Lancashire have only one bed-room. Scarcely one family in ten has more than two; so that, in the majority of cases, it is impossible to preserve anything like a decent separation of the sexes in the sleeping rooms. I have been assured on all hands in Lancashire-by magistrates, manufacturers and operatives -that the immoral consequences of this state of things are terrible. Both in London, and in our larger provincial towns, it is no uncommon thing for two, three, and even four families to sleep in one room without any screen between the beds.

"The evils resulting from this want of accommodation are still further enhanced by the wretched state of the back streets and alleys of our towns. In the larger of the provincial towns of England and Wales, the condition of those streets and alleys is as bad as it can be. They are built after no plan. They are narrow and often closed at one end. They are very badly drained. The openings of what drains there are, are generally close to the windows or doors of the houses. There is often only one privy for three, four, and sometimes as many as ten houses.

"The streets and yards themselves are used for the filthiest purposes. Night-soil is spread about in the yards and on the pavements. The stench of these haunts is often insufferable.

396

DREADFUL EFFECTS ON THE YOUNG.

"The misery of life in these places is greatly increased by the fact, that there is often a very poor supply of water, and that the inhabitants are without the means, even if they had the will, to cleanse the streets of the filth which accumulates upon their pavements. There is scarcely a town of any magnitude in England or Wales which has not many quarters of this description."

Among the demoralizing effects of this dreadful state of things, the most appalling come upon the devoted heads of" the young children born in these places, who are left from morning to night for many years of their lives to grow up in the filth, amid the horrible scenes, and under the continued degrading influences of these streets-unaccustomed to clean habits, clean dress, or to happy or healthy associations, but in the darkest ignorance; and that these poor little wretches have to creep back at night into crowded, loathsome, and immoral sleeping rooms, without having enjoyed any purer or more moral atmosphere or associations during the whole of the past day. If we reflect on the necessary effects of such a life as this, we shall not wonder at the vast numbers of our criminals and paupers, or at the degraded condition of so many of our town laborers." The contrast between England and neighboring countries is drawn by the same honest writer:

"Thus, while throughout Western Europe the schools are tending to improve the cleanliness, order, comfort and propriety of the life of the town poor, by improving and forming the tastes and habits of the young, and by snatching them from the degrading scenes and associations to which the young of our towns are exposed, in our country, the way in which the children are growing up in the streets renders the horrible state of our back streets even more injurious and demoralizing than they otherwise would be, to the habits and the character of our town laborers."

K

XXIII.

NOWLEDGE of such astounding disclosures, revealing such incomprehensible scenes of degradation in the very bosom of the highest civilization on the earth, proved so shocking and incredible, that the Statistical Society of London de

ALL AGES AND SEXES HERDED.

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termined to undertake the work, and, in their expressive language, “sift the whole thing to the bottom." They appointed a committee of their own members to "investigate the state of the inhabitants and their dwellings in Church Lane, St. Giles, London." The Committee did their work thoroughly, and close the voluminous calendar of horror with these comments: [Journal of the Statis. Soc., London. Vol. vi., p. 17.]

"Your committee have thus given a picture in detail of human wretchedness, filth and brutal degradation, the chief features of which are a disgrace to a civilized country, and which your committee have reason to fear, from letters which have appeared in the public journals, is but the type of the miserable condition of masses of the community, whether located in the small, ill-ventilated rooms of manufacturing towns, or in many of the cottages of the agricultural peasantry. In these wretched dwellings, all ages and all sexes-fathers and daughters, mothers and sons, grown-up brothers and sisters, stranger adult males and females, and swarms of children-the sick, the dying and the dead—all herded together with proximity and mutual pressure which brutes would resist; where it is physically impossible to preserve the ordinary decencies of life; where all sense of propriety and self-respect must be lost, to be replaced only by a recklessness of demeanor which necessarily results from vitiated minds."

Two gentlemen also furnished the means of making a similar search in the parish of St. George's in the East of London—this being considered a fair example of the average condition of the poorer classes of London. The Report appears in the Jour. of the Stat. Soc. Vol. xi. It shows that:

"Out of these 1954 families visited, 551 families, containing a population of 2025 persons, have only one room each, where father, mother, sons and daughters live and sleep together; 562 families, containing a population of 2454 persons, have only two rooms each, in one of which people of different sexes must undress and sleep together; 705 families, containing a population of 1950 persons, have only one bed each, in which the whole family sleep together; 729 families, including a population of 3455 persons, have only two beds each, in one of which the parents sleep, and in the other of which all the sons and daughters sleep together.

"In more than one-fourth of the houses, there were no serious books, Prayer-book or Bible, and the impression of the agents employed in visiting the houses was, that of all the books found in the houses, the Bible was the least read."

398

EAST AND WEST ENDS OF LONDON.

No impression is more common in America, than that in certain districts in the East part of London there is a good deal of misery-but that it is confined chiefly to that quarter. But a glance at "City Mission Reports" would correct this impression. The Report on Orchard Place and Gray's Buildings, in the West End of London, says:

"Orchard Place is (including two nooks) less than 45 yards long, and 8 broad, and contains 27 houses. Resident in this court, in 1845, were no less than 217 families, consisting of 852 persons, of whom 582 were above 14 years of age! The population of a large village, or a small town, is here comprised in one court. Kew, for instance, at the last census, had a population which exceeded it but by 41, and Abingdon exceeded it but by 38. Strathfieldsaye is less populous by 48; while the population of Brixton, in the Isle of Wight, is only 710; of Yarmouth, in the same island, but 567; and of Broxbourne, in Hertfordshire, but 643. . . . . . The description which we presented to our readers of the district of St. Giles, in the Magazine for November, 1847, showed that each of the houses there contained 100 persons.

"In 1847, however, the population of Orchard Place had considerably increased, notwithstanding the way in which the houses were crowded in 1845. It appears that in 1847 the 27 houses contained 476 families, and from 882 to 1222 individuals, and this, too, in the month of March, when the court is much more thinly populated than at any other season of the year."

Personal inspection by Mr. Kay enables him to say that the same state of things exists in the back streets of Kensington and of Oxford street, "while in Westminster it is even worse. In the extreme parts of the city, and in the neighborhood of the docks, it is even more horrible. And yet nothing worth speaking of is being done to check the continued growth of this terrible social cancer. It increases with the increase, and even faster than the increase in the multitudes of London, unchecked, as if there were no social remedy, and as if it were a necessary consequence of the system of great towns. And yet nothing like this state of things exists to any extent in the capitals of Germany. Certainly we have no right to say it cannot be cured, until we have tried all possible means of curing it; and as long as at least one half of the juvenile population is left to grow up without any education, we cannot say that we have done all that is possible."