Problems of Poverty | Page 4

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 of existence, all the work they do could be done, together with their
own work, by the men, women, and children of classes C and D; that
all they earn and spend might be earned, and could very easily be spent,
by the classes above them; that these classes, and especially class C,
would be immensely better off, while no class, nor any industry, would
suffer in the least." Class C consists of 75,000, or 8 per cent., subsisting
on intermittent earnings of from 18s. to 21s. for a moderate- sized
family. Low-skilled labourers, poorer artizans, street-sellers, small
shopkeepers, largely constitute this class, the curse of whose life is not
so much low wages as irregularity of employment, and the moral and
physical degradation caused thereby. Above these, forming the top
stratum of "poor," comes a large class, numbering 129,000, or 14½ per

cent., dependent upon small regular earnings of from 18s. to 21s.,
including many dock-and water-side labourers, factory and warehouse
hands, car-men, messengers, porters, &c. "What they have comes in
regularly, and except in times of sickness in the family, actual want
rarely presses, unless the wife drinks."
"As a general rule these men have a hard struggle, but they are, as a
body, decent, steady men, paying their way and bringing up their
children respectably" (p. 50).
Mr Booth, in confining the title "poor" to this 35 per cent. of the
population of East London, takes, perhaps for sufficient reasons, a
somewhat narrow interpretation of the term. For in the same district no
less than 377,000, or over 42 per cent. of the inhabitants, live upon
earnings varying from 21s. to 30s. per week. So long as the father is in
regular work, and his family is not too large, a fair amount of material
comfort may doubtless be secured by those who approach the
maximum. But such an income leaves little margin for saving, and
innumerable forms of mishaps will bring such families down beneath
the line of poverty. Though the East End contains more poverty than
some other parts of London the difference is less than commonly
supposed. Mr Booth estimated that of the total population of the
metropolis 30.7 per cent. were living in poverty. The figure for York is
placed by Mr Seebohm Rowntree[4] at the slightly lower figure of
27.84. These figures (in both cases exclusive of the population of the
workhouses and other public or private institutions) may be taken as
fairly representative of life in English industrial cities. A recent
investigation of an ordinary agricultural village in Bedfordshire[5]
discloses a larger amount of poverty--no less than 34.3 per cent. of the
population falling below the income necessary for physical efficiency.
§ 4. Prices for the Poor.--These figures relating to money income do
not bring home to us the evil of poverty. It is not enough to know what
the weekly