LITMIR.BIZ

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Interest £450,000,000. Profits £450,000,000. Wages £650,000,000.[1] Total £1750,000,000.

      Professor Leone Levi reckoned the number of working-class families as 5,600,000, and their total income £470,000,000 in the year 1884.[2] If we now divide the larger money, minus £650,000,000, among a number of families proportionate to the increase of the population, viz. 6,900,000, we shall find that the average yearly income of a working-class family comes to about £94, or a weekly earnings of about 36s. This figure is of necessity a speculative one, and is probably in excess of the actual average income of a working family.

      This, then, we may regard as the first halting-place in our inquiry. But in looking at the average money income of a wage-earning family, there are several further considerations which vitally affect the measurement of the pressure of poverty.

      First, there is the fact, that out of an estimated population of some 42,000,000, only 12,000,000, or about three out of every ten persons in the richest country of Europe, belong to a class which is able to live in decent comfort, free from the pressing cares of a close economy. The other seven are of necessity confined to a standard of life little, if at all, above the line of bare necessaries.

      Secondly, the careful figures collected by these statisticians show that the national income equally divided throughout the community would yield an average income, per family, of about £182 per annum. A comparison of this sum with the average working-class income of £94, brings home the extent of inequality in the distribution of the national income. While it indicates that any approximation towards equality of incomes would not bring affluence, at anyrate on the present scale of national productivity, it serves also to refute the frequent assertions that poverty is unavoidable because Great Britain is not rich enough to furnish a comfortable livelihood for everyone.

      § 2. Gradations of Working-class Incomes.--But though it is true that an income of 36s. a week for an ordinary family leaves but a small margin for "superfluities," it will be evident that if every family possessed this sum, we should have little of the worst evils of poverty. If we would understand the extent of the disease, we must seek it in the inequality of incomes among the labouring classes themselves. No family need be reduced to suffering on 36s. a week. But unfortunately the differences of income among the working-classes are proportionately nearly as great as among the well-to-do classes. It is not merely the difference between the wages of skilled and unskilled labour; the 50s. per week of the high-class engineer, or typographer, and the 1s. 2d. per diem of the sandwich-man, or the difference between the wages of men and women workers. There is a more important cause of difference than these. When the average income of a working family is named, it must not be supposed that this represents the wage of the father of the family alone. Each family contains about 2¼ workers on an average. This is a fact, the significance of which is obvious. In some families, the father and mother, and one or two of the children, will be contributors to the weekly income; in other cases, the burden of maintaining a large family may be thrown entirely on the shoulders of a single worker, perhaps the widowed mother. If we reckon that the average wage of a working man is about 24s., that of a working woman 15s., we realize the strain which the loss of the male bread-winner throws on the survivor.

      In looking at the gradations of income among the working-classes, it must be borne in mind that as you go lower down in the standard of living, each drop in money income represents a far more than proportionate increase of the pressure of poverty. Halve the income of a rich man, you oblige him to retrench; he must give up his yacht, his carriage, or other luxuries; but such retrenchment, though it may wound his pride, will not cause him great personal discomfort. But halve the income of a well-paid mechanic, and you reduce him and his family at once to the verge of starvation. A drop from 25s. to 12s. 6d. a week involves a vastly greater sacrifice than a drop from £500 to £250 a year. A working-class family, however comfortably it may live with a full contingent of regular workers, is almost always liable, by sickness, death, or loss of employment, to be reduced in a few weeks to a position of penury.

      § 3. Measurement of East London Poverty.--This brief account of the inequality of incomes has brought us by successive steps down to the real object of our inquiry, the amount and the intensity of poverty. For it is not inequality of income, but actual suffering, which moves the heart of humanity. What do we know of the numbers and the life of those who lie below the average, and form the lower orders of the working-classes?

      Some years ago the civilized world was startled by the Bitter Cry of Outcast London, and much trouble has been taken of late to gauge the poverty of London. A host of active missionaries are now at work, engaged in religious, moral, and sanitary teaching, in charitable relief, or in industrial organization. But perhaps the most valuable work has been that which has had no such directly practical object in view, but has engaged itself in the collection of trustworthy information. Mr. Charles Booth's book, The Labour and Life of the People, has an importance far in advance of that considerable attention which it has received. Its essential value is not merely that it supplies, for the first time, a large and carefully collected fund of facts for the formation of sound opinions and the explosion of fallacies, but that it lays down lines of a new branch of social study, in the pursuit of which the most delicate intellectual interests will be identified with a close and absorbing devotion to the practical issues of life.

      In the study of poverty, the work of Mr. Booth and his collaborators may truly rank as an epoch-making work.

      For the purpose we have immediately before us, the measurement of poverty, the figures supplied in this book are invaluable. Considerations of space will compel us to confine our attention to such figures as will serve to mark the extent and meaning of city poverty in London. But though, as will be seen, the industrial causes of London poverty are in some respects peculiar, there is every reason to believe that the extent and nature of poverty does not widely differ in all large centres of population.

      The area which Mr. Booth places under microscopic observation covers Shoreditch, Bethnal Green, Whitechapel, St. George's in the East, Stepney, Mile End, Old Town, Poplar, Hackney, and comprises a population 891,539. Of these no less than 316,000, or 35 per cent, belong to families whose weekly earnings amount to less than 21s. This 35 per cent, compose the "poor," according to the estimate of Mr. Booth, and it will be worth while to note the social elements which constitute this class. The "poor" are divided into four classes or strata, marked A, B, C, D. At the bottom comes A, a body of some 11,000, or 1¼ per cent, of hopeless, helpless city savages, who can only be said by courtesy to belong to the "working-classes" "Their life is the life of savages, with vicissitudes of extreme hardship and occasional excess. Their food is of the coarsest description, and their only luxury is drink. It is not easy to say how they live; the living is picked up, and what is got is frequently shared; when they cannot find 3d. for their night's lodging, unless favourably known to the deputy, they are turned out at night into the street, to return to the common kitchen in the morning. From these come the battered figures who slouch through the streets, and play the beggar or the bully, or help to foul the record of the unemployed; these are the worst class of corner-men, who hang round the doors of public-houses, the young men who spring forward on any chance to earn a copper, the ready materials for disorder when occasion serves. They render no useful service; they create no wealth; more often they destroy it."[3]

      Next comes B, a thicker stratum of some 100,000, or 11½ per cent., largely composed of shiftless, broken-down men, widows, deserted women, and their families, dependent upon casual earnings, less than 18s. per week, and most of them incapable of regular, effective work. Most of the social wreckage of city life is deposited in this stratum, which presents the problem of poverty in its most perplexed and darkest form. For this class hangs as a burden on the shoulders of the more capable classes which stand just above it. Mr. Booth writes of it--

      "It may not be too much to say that if the whole of class B were swept out

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