In Darkest England and The Way Out | Page 9

reeks with malaria. The foul and
fetid breath of our slums is almost as poisonous as that of the African
swamp. Fever is almost as chronic there as on the Equator. Every year
thousands of children are killed off by what is called defects of our
sanitary system. They are in reality starved and poisoned, and all that
can be said is that, in many cases, it is better for them that they were
taken away from the trouble to come.
Just as in Darkest Africa it is only a part of the evil and misery that
comes from the superior race who invade the forest to enslave and
massacre its miserable inhabitants, so with us, much of the misery of
those whose lot we are considering arises from their own habits.
Drunkenness and all manner of uncleanness, moral and physical,
abound. Have you ever watched by the bedside of a man in delirium
tremens? Multiply the sufferings of that one drunkard by the hundred
thousand, and you have some idea of what scenes are being witnessed
in all our great cities at this moment. As in Africa streams intersect the
forest in every direction, so the gin-shop stands at every corner with its
River of the Water of Death flowing seventeen hours out of the
twenty-four for the destruction of the people. A population sodden with
drink, steeped in vice, eaten up by every social and physical malady,
these are the denizens of Darkest England amidst whom my life has
been spent, and to whose rescue I would now summon all that is best in
the manhood and womanhood of our land.
But this book is no mere lamentation of despair. For Darkest England,
as for Darkest Africa, there is a light beyond. I think I see my way out,
a way by which these wretched ones may escape from the gloom of
their miserable existence into a higher and happier life. Long
wandering in the Forest of the Shadow of Death at out doors, has
familiarised me with its horrors; but while the realisation is a vigorous
spur to action it has never been so oppressive as to extinguish hope. Mr.
Stanley never succumbed to the terrors which oppressed his followers.

He had lived in a larger life, and knew that the forest, though long, was
not interminable. Every step forward brought him nearer his destined
goal, nearer to the light of the sun, the clear sky, and the rolling uplands
of the grazing land. Therefore he did not despair. The Equatorial Forest
was, after all, a mere corner of one quarter of the world. In the
knowledge of the light outside, in the confidence begotten by past
experience of successful endeavour, he pressed forward; and when the
160 days' struggle was over, he and his men came out into a pleasant
place where the land smiled with peace and plenty, and their hardships
and hunger were forgotten in the joy of a great deliverance.
So I venture to believe it will be with us. But the end is not yet. We are
still in the depths of the depressing gloom. It is in no spirit of
light-heartedness that this book is sent forth into the world as if it was
written some ten years ago.
If this were the first time that this wail of hopeless misery had sounded
on our ears the matter would have been less serious. It is because we
have heard it so often that the case is so desperate. The exceeding bitter
cry of the disinherited has become to be as familiar in the ears of men
as the dull roar of the streets or as the moaning of the wind through the
trees. And so it rises unceasing, year in and year out, and we are too
busy or too idle, too indifferent or too selfish, to spare it a thought.
Only now and then, on rare occasions, when some clear voice is heard
giving more articulate utterance to the miseries of the miserable men,
do we pause in the regular routine of our daily duties, and shudder as
we realise for one brief moment what life means to the inmates of the
Slums. But one of the grimmest social problems of our time should be
sternly faced, not with a view to the generation of profitless emotion,
but with a view to its solution.
Is it not time? There is, it is true, an audacity in the mere suggestion
that the problem is not insoluble that is enough to take away the breath.
But can nothing be done? If, after full and exhaustive consideration, we
come to the deliberate conclusion that nothing can be done, and that it
is the inevitable and inexorable destiny of thousands of Englishmen to
be brutalised