As We Are and As We May Be Part 4

There are several riverside parishes east of London Bridge, not counting the ancient towns of Deptford and Greenwich, which formerly lay beyond London, and could not be reckoned as suburbs. The history of all these parishes, till the present century, is the same. Once, south-east and west of London, there stretched a broad marsh covered with water at every spring-tide; here and there rose islets overgrown with brambles, the haunt of wild fowl innumerable. In course of time, the city having grown and stretching out long arms along the bank, people began to build a broad and strong river-wall to keep out the floods. This river-wall, which still remains, was gradually extended until it reached the mouth of the river and ran quite round the low coast of Ess.e.x. To the marshes succeeded a vast level, low-lying, fertile region affording good pasture, excellent dairy farms, and gardens of fruit and vegetables. The only inhabitants of this district were the farmers and the farmhands. So things continued for a thousand years, while the s.h.i.+ps went up the river with wind and tide, and down the river with wind and tide, and were moored below the Bridge, and discharged their cargoes into lighters, which landed them on the quays of London Port, between the Tower and the Bridge. As for the people who did the work of the Port--the loading and the unloading--those whom now we call the stevedores, coalers, dockers, lightermen, and watermen, they lived in the narrow lanes and crowded courts above and about Thames Street.

When the trade of London Port increased, these courts became more crowded; some of them overflowed, and a colony outside the walls was established in St. Katherine's Precinct beyond the Tower. Next to St.

Katherine's lay the fields called by Stow 'Wappin in the Wose,' or Wash, where there were broken places in the wall, and the water poured in so that it was as much a marsh as when there was no d.y.k.e at all.

Then the Commissioners of Sewers thought it would be a good plan to encourage people to build along the wall, so that they would be personally interested in its preservation. Thus arose the Hamlet of Wapping, which, till far into the eighteenth century, consisted of little more than a single long street, with a few cross lanes, inhabited by sailor-folk. At this time--toward the end of the sixteenth century--began that great and wonderful development of London trade which has continued without any cessation of growth.

Gresham began it. He taught the citizens how to unite for the common weal; he gave them a Bourse; he transferred the foreign trade of Antwerp to the Thames. Then the service of the river grew apace; where one lighter had sufficed there were now wanted ten; 'Wappin in the Wose' became crowded Wapping; the long street stretched farther and farther along the river beyond Shad's Well; beyond Ratcliff Cross, where the 'red cliff' came down nearly to the river bank; beyond the 'Lime-house'; beyond the 'Poplar' Grove. The whole of that great city of a million souls, now called East London, consisted, until the end of the last century, of Whitechapel and Bethnal Green, still preserving something of the old rusticity; of Mile End, Stepney and Bow, and West Ham, hamlets set among fields, and market-gardens, and of that long fringe of riverside streets and houses. In these rural hamlets great merchants had their country-houses; the place was fertile; the air was wholesome; nowhere could one see finer flowers or finer plants; the merchant-captains--both those at sea and those retired--had houses with garden-bowers and masts at Mile End Old Town.

Captain Cook left his wife and children there when he went sailing round the world; here, because ground was cheap and plentiful, were long rope-walks and tenter-grounds; here were roadside taverns and gardens for the thirsty Londoner on a summer evening, here were placed many almshouses, dotted about among the gardens, where the poor old folks lengthened their days in peace and fresh air.

But Riverside London was a far different place, here lived none but sailors, watermen, lightermen, and all those who had to do with s.h.i.+ps and s.h.i.+pping, with the wants and the pleasures of the sailors. Boat builders had their yards along the bank; mastmakers, sail-makers, rope-makers, block-makers; there were repairing docks dotted about all down the river, each able to hold one s.h.i.+p at a time, like one or two still remaining at Rotherhithe, there were s.h.i.+p-building yards of considerable importance; all these places employed a vast number of workmen--carpenters, caulkers, painters, riggers, carvers of figure-heads, block-makers, stevedores, lightermen, watermen, victuallers, tavern-keepers, and all the roguery and _ribauderie_ that always gather round mercantile Jack ash.o.r.e. A crowded suburb indeed it was, and for the most part with no gentlefolk to give the people an example of conduct, temperance, and religion--at best the master-mariners, a decorous people, and the better cla.s.s of tradesmen, to lead the way to church. And as time went on the better cla.s.s vanished, until the riverside parishes became abandoned entirely to mercantile Jack, and to those who live by loading and unloading, repairing and building the s.h.i.+ps, and by showing Jack ash.o.r.e how fastest and best to spend his money. There were churches--Wapping, St.

George in the East, Shadwell, and Lime-house--they are there to this day; but Jack and his friends enter not their portals. Moreover, when they were built the function of the clergyman was to perform with dignity and reverence the services of the church; if people chose not to come, and the law of attendance could not be enforced, so much the worse for them. Though Jack kept out of church, there was some religious life in the place, as is shown not only by the presence of the church, but also by that of the chapel. Now, wherever there is a chapel it indicates thought, independence, and a sensible elevation above the reckless, senseless rabble. Some kinds of Nonconformity also indicate a first step toward education and culture.

He who now stands on London Bridge and looks down the river, will see a large number of steamers lying off the quays; there are barges, river steamers, and boats, there are great ocean steamers working up or down the river; but there is little to give the stranger even a suspicion of the enormous trade that is carried on at the Port of London. That port is now hidden behind the dock gates; the trade is invisible unless one enters the docks and reckons up the s.h.i.+ps and their tonnage, the warehouses and their contents. But a hundred years ago this trade was visible to any who chose to look at it, and the s.h.i.+ps in which the trade was carried on were visible as well.

Below the Bridge, the river, for more than a mile, pursues a straight course with a uniform breadth. It then bends in a north-easterly direction for a mile or so, when it turns southward, pa.s.sing Deptford and Greenwich. Now, a hundred years ago, for two miles and more below the bridge, the s.h.i.+ps lay moored side by side in double lines, with a narrow channel between. There were no docks; all the loading and the unloading had to be done by means of barges and lighters in the stream. One can hardly realize this vast concourse of boats and barges and s.h.i.+ps; the thousands of men at work; the pa.s.sage to and fro of the barges laden to the water's edge, or returning empty to the s.h.i.+p's side; the yeo-heave-oh! of the sailors hoisting up the casks and bales and cases; the shouting, the turmoil, the quarrelling, the fighting, the tumult upon the river, now so peaceful. But when we talk of a riverside parish we must remember this great concourse, because it was the cause of practices from which we suffer to the present day.

Of these things we may be perfectly certain. First, that without the presence among a people of some higher life, some n.o.bler standard, than that of the senses, this people will sink rapidly and surely.

Next, that no cla.s.s of persons, whether in the better or the worser rank, can ever be trusted to be a law unto themselves. For which reason we may continue to be grateful to our ancestors who caused to be written in large letters of gold, for all the world to see once a week, "THUS SAITH THE LORD, Thou shalt not steal," and the rest: the lack of which reminder sometimes causes in Nonconformist circles, it is whispered, a deplorable separation of faith and works. The third maxim, axiom, or self-evident proposition is, that when people can steal without fear of consequences they will steal. All through the last century, and indeed far into this, the only influence brought to bear upon the common people was that of authority. The master ruled his servants; he watched over them; when they were young he had them catechized and taught the sentiments proper to their station; he also flogged them soundly; when they grew up he gave them wages and work; he made them go to church regularly; he rewarded them for industry by fraternal care; he sent them to the almshouse when they were old. At church the sermons were not for the servants but for the masters; yet the former were reminded every week of the Ten Commandments, which were not only written out large for all to see, but were read out for their instruction every Sunday morning. The decay of authority is one of the distinguis.h.i.+ng features of the present century.

But in Riverside London there were no masters, and there was no authority for the great ma.s.s of the people. The sailor ash.o.r.e had no master; the men who worked on the lighters and on the s.h.i.+ps had no master except for the day; the ign.o.ble horde of those who supplied the coa.r.s.e pleasures of the sailors had no masters; they were not made to do anything but what they pleased; the church was not for them; their children were not sent to school; their only masters were the fear of the gallows, constantly before their eyes at Execution Dock and on the sh.o.r.es of the Isle of Dogs, and their profound respect for the cat o'

nine tails. They knew no morality; they had no other restraint; they all together slid, ran, fell, leaped, danced, and rolled swiftly and easily adown the Primrose Path; they fell into a savagery the like of which has never been known among English-folk since the days of their conversion to the Christian faith. It is only by searching and poking among unknown pamphlets and forgotten books that one finds out the actual depths of the English savagery of the last century. And it is not too much to say that for drunkenness, brutality, and ignorance, the Englishman of the baser kind touched about the lowest depth ever reached by civilized man during the last century. What he was in Riverside London has been disclosed by Colquhoun, the Police Magistrate. Here he was not only a drunkard, a brawler, a torturer of dumb beasts, a wife-beater, a profligate--he was also, with his fellows, engaged every day, and all day long, in a vast systematic organized depredation. The people of the riverside were all, to a man, river pirates; by day and by night they stole from the s.h.i.+ps. There were often as many as a thousand vessels lying in the river; there were many hundreds of boats, barges, and lighters engaged upon their cargoes, They practised their robberies in a thousand ingenious ways; they weighed the anchors and stole them; they cut adrift lighters when they were loaded, and when they had floated down the river they pillaged what they could carry and left the rest to sink or swim; they waited till night and then rowed of to half-laden lighters and helped themselves. Sometimes they went on board the s.h.i.+ps as stevedores and tossed bales overboard to a confederate in a boat below; or they were coopers who carried under their ap.r.o.ns bags which they filled with sugar from the casks; or they took with them bladders for stealing the rum. Some waded about in the mud at low tide to catch anything that was thrown to them from the s.h.i.+ps. Some obtained admission to the s.h.i.+p as rat-catchers, and in that capacity were able to carry away plunder previously concealed by their friends; some, called _scuffle-hunters_, stood on the quays as porters, carrying bags under their long white ap.r.o.ns in which to hide whatever they could pilfer. It was estimated that, taking one year with another, the depredations from the s.h.i.+pping in the Port of London amounted to nearly a quarter of a million sterling every year. All this was carried on by the riverside people.

But, to make robbery successful, there must be accomplices, receiving-houses, fences, a way to dispose of the goods. In this case the thieves had as their accomplices the whole of the population of the quarter where they lived. All the public-houses were secret markets attended by grocers and other tradesmen where the booty was sold by auction, and, to escape detection, fict.i.tious bills and accounts were given and received. The thieves were known among themselves by fancy names, which at once indicated the special line of each and showed the popularity of the calling; they were bold pirates, night plunderers, light hors.e.m.e.n, heavy hors.e.m.e.n, mud-larks, game lightermen, scuffle-hunters and gangsmen. Their thefts enabled them to live in the coa.r.s.e profusion of meat and drink, which was all they wanted; yet they were always poor because their plunder was knocked down for so little; they saved nothing; and they were always egged on to new robberies by the men who sold them drinks, by the women who took their money from them, and by the honest merchants who attended the secret markets.

I dwell upon the past because the present is its natural legacy. When you read of the efforts now being made to raise the living, or at least to prevent them from sinking any lower, remember that they are what the dead made them. We inherit more than the wealth of our ancestors; we inherit the consequences of their misdeeds. It is a most expensive thing to suffer the people to drop and sink; it is a sad burden which we lay upon posterity if we do not continually spend our utmost in lifting them up. Why, we have been the best part of two thousand years in recovering the civilization which fell to pieces when the Roman Empire decayed. We have not been fifty years in dragging up the very poor whom we neglected and left to themselves, the gallows, the cat, and the press-gang only a hundred years ago. And how slow, how slow and sometimes hopeless, is the work!

The establishment of river police and the construction of docks have cleared the river of all this gentry. s.h.i.+ps now enter the docks; there discharge and receive; the labourers can carry away nothing through the dock-gates. No ap.r.o.n allows a bag to be hidden; policemen stand at the gates to search the men; the old game is gone--what is left is a surviving spirit of lawlessness; the herding together; the hand-to-mouth life; the love of drink as the chief attainable pleasure; the absence of conscience and responsibility; and the old brutality.

What the riverside then was may be learned by a small piece of Rotherhithe in which the old things still linger. Small repairing-docks, each capable of holding one vessel, are dotted along the street; to each are its great dock-gates, keeping out the high tide, and the quays and the shops and the caretaker's lodge; the s.h.i.+p lies in the dock sh.o.r.ed up by timbers on either side, and the workmen are hammering, caulking, painting, and sc.r.a.ping the wooden hull; her bowsprit and her figurehead stick out over the street, Between the docks are small two-storied houses, half of them little shops trying to sell something; the public-house is frequent, but the 'Humours' of Ratcliff Highway are absent; mercantile Jack at Rotherhithe is mostly Norwegian and has morals of his own. Such, however, as this little village of Rotherhithe is, so were 'Wappin in the Wose,' Shadwell, Ratcliff, and the 'Limehouse' a hundred years ago, with the addition of street fighting and brawling all day long; the perpetual adoration of rum, quarrels over stolen goods; quarrels over drunken drabs; quarrels over all-fours; the sc.r.a.ping of fiddles from every public-house, the noise of singing, feasting, and dancing, and a never-ending, still-beginning debauch, all hushed and quiet--as birds cower in the hedge at sight of the kestrel--when the press-gang swept down the narrow streets and carried off the lads, unwilling to leave the girls and the grog, and put them aboard His Majesty's tender to meet what fate might bring.

The construction of the great docks has completely changed this quarter. The Precinct of St. Katherine's by the Tower has almost entirely disappeared, being covered by St. Katherine's Dock; the London Dock has reduced Wapping to a strip covered with warehouses.

But the church remains, so frankly proclaiming itself of the eighteenth century, with its great churchyard. The new Dock Basin, Limehouse Basin, and the West India Docks, have sliced huge cantles out of Shadwell, Limehouse, and Poplar; the little private docks and boat-building yards have disappeared; here and there the dock remains, with its river gates gone, an ancient barge reposing in its black mud; here and there may be found a great building which was formerly a warehouse when s.h.i.+p-building was still carried on. That branch of industry was abandoned after 1868, when the s.h.i.+pwrights struck. Their action transferred the s.h.i.+p-building of the country to the Clyde, and threw out of work thousands of men who had been earning large wages in the yards. Before this unlucky event Riverside London had been rough and squalid, but there were in it plenty of people earning good wages--skilled artisans, good craftsmen. Since then it has been next door to starving. The effect of the s.h.i.+pwrights' strike may be ill.u.s.trated in the history of one couple.

The man, of Irish parentage, though born in Stepney, was a painter or decorator of the saloons and cabins of the s.h.i.+ps. He was a highly-skilled workman of taste and dexterity; he could not only paint but he could carve; he made about three pounds a week and lived in comfort. The wife, a decent Yorks.h.i.+re woman whose manners were very much above those of the riverside folk, was a few years older than her husband. They had no children. During the years of fatness they saved nothing; the husband was not a drunkard, but, like most workmen, he liked to cut a figure and to make a show. So he saved little or nothing. When the yard was finally closed he had to cadge about for work. Fifteen years later he was found in a single room of the meanest tenement-house; his furniture was reduced to a bed, a table, and a chair; all that they had was a little tea and no money--no money at all. He was weak and ill, with trudging about in search of work; he was lying exhausted on the bed while his wife sat crouched over the little bit of fire. This was how they had lived for fifteen years--the whole time on the verge of starvation. Well, they were taken away; they were persuaded to leave their quarters and to try anther place, where odd jobs were found for the man, and where the woman made friends in private families, for whom she did a little sewing. But it was too late for the man; his privations had destroyed his sleight of hand, though he knew it not; the fine workman was gone. He took painters' paralysis, and very often when work was offered his hand would drop before he could begin it; then the long years of tramping about had made him restless; from time to time he was fain to borrow a few s.h.i.+llings and to go on the tramp again, pretending that he was in search of work; he would stay away for a fortnight, marching about from place to place, heartily enjoying the change and the social evening at the public-houses where he put up. For, though no drunkard, he loved to sit in a warm bar and to talk over the splendours of the past. Then he died. No one, now looking at the neat old lady in the clean white cap and ap.r.o.n who sits all day in the nursery crooning over her work, would believe that she has gone through this ordeal by famine, and served her fifteen years' term of starvation for the sins of others.

The Parish of St. James's, Ratcliff, is the least known of Riverside London. There is nothing about this parish in the Guide-books; n.o.body goes to see it. Why should they? There is nothing to see. Yet it is not without its romantic touches. Once there was here a cross--the Ratcliff Cross--but n.o.body knows what it was, when it was erected, why it was erected, or when it was pulled down. The oldest inhabitant now at Ratcliff remembers that there was a cross here--the name survived until the other day, attached to a little street, but that is now gone. It is mentioned in Dryden. And on the Queen's Accession, in 1837, she was proclaimed, among other places, at Ratcliff Cross--but why, no one knows. Once the s.h.i.+pwrights' Company had their hall here; it stood among gardens where the scent of the gillyflower and the stock mingled with the scent of the tar from the neighbouring rope-yard and boat-building yard. In the old days, many were the feasts which the jolly s.h.i.+pwrights held in their hall after service at St. Dunstan's, Stepney. The hall is now pulled down, and the Company, which is one of the smallest, worth an income of less than a thousand, has never built another. Then there are the Ratcliff Stairs--rather dirty and dilapidated to look at, but, at half-tide, affording the best view one can get anywhere of the Pool and the s.h.i.+pping. In the good old days of the scuffle-hunters and the heavy hors.e.m.e.n, the view of the thousand s.h.i.+ps moored in their long lines with the narrow pa.s.sage between was splendid. History has deigned to speak of Ratcliff Stairs. 'Twas by these steps that the gallant Willoughby embarked for his fatal voyage; with flags flying and the discharge of guns he sailed past Greenwich, hoping that the King would come forth to see him pa.s.s. Alas! the young King lay a-dying, and Willoughby himself was sailing off to meet his death.

The parish contains four good houses, all of which, I believe, are marked in Roque's map of 1745.

One of these is now the vicarage of the new church. It is a large, solid, and substantial house, built early in the last century, when as yet the light hors.e.m.e.n and lumpers were no nearer than Wapping. The walls of the dining-room are painted with Italian landscapes, to which belongs a romance. The paintings were executed by a young Italian artist. For the sake of convenience he was allowed by the merchant who then lived here, and employed him, to stay in the house. Now the merchant had a daughter, and she was fair. The artist was a goodly youth, and inflammable; as the poet says, their eyes met; presently, as the poet goes on, their lips met; then the merchant found out what was going on, and ordered the young man, with good old British determination, out of the house. The young man retired to his room, presumably to pack up his things. But he did not go out of the house; instead of that, he hanged himself in his room. His ghost, naturally, continued to remain in the house, and has been seen by many. Why he has not long ago joined the ghost of the young lady is not clear unless that, like many ghosts, his chief pleasure is in keeping as miserable as he possibly can.

The second large house of the parish is apparently of the same date, but the broad garden in which it formerly stood has been built over with mean tenement houses. Nothing is known about it; at present certain Roman Catholic sisters live in it, and carry on some kind of work.

The third great house is one of the few surviving specimens of the merchant's warehouse and residence in one. It is now an old and tumbledown place. Its ancient history I know not. What rich and costly bales were hoisted into this warehouse; what goods lay here waiting to be carried down the Stairs, and so on board s.h.i.+p in the Pool; what fortunes were made and lost here one knows not. Its ancient history is gone and lost, but it has a modern history. Here a certain man began, in a small way, a work which has grown to be great; here he spent and was spent; here he gave his life for the work, which was for the children of the poor. He was a young physician; he saw in this squalid and crowded neighbourhood the lives of the children needlessly sacrificed by the thousand for the want of a hospital; to be taken ill in the wretched room where the whole family lived was to die; the nearest hospital was two miles away. The young physician had but slender means, but he had a stout heart. He found this house empty, its rent a song. He took it, put in half a dozen beds, const.i.tuted himself the physician and his wife the nurse, and opened the Children's Hospital. Very soon the rooms became wards; the wards became crowded with children; the one nurse was multiplied by twenty; the one physician by six. Very soon, too, the physician lay upon his death-bed, killed by the work. But the Children's Hospital was founded, and now it stands, not far off, a stately building with one of its wards--the Heckford Ward--named after the physician who gave his own life to save the children. When the house ceased to be a hospital it was taken by a Mr. Dawson, who was the first to start here a club for the very rough lads. He, too, gave his life for the cause, for the illness which killed him was due to overwork and neglect.

Devotion and death are therefore a.s.sociated with this old house.

The fourth large house is now degraded to a common lodging-house. But it has still its fine old staircase.

The Parish of St. James's, Ratcliff, consists of an irregular patch of ground having the river on the south, and the Commercial Road, one of the great arteries of London, on the north. It contains about seven thousand people, of whom some three thousand are Irish Catholics. It includes a number of small, mean, and squalid streets; there is not anywhere in the great city a collection of streets smaller or meaner.

The people live in tenement-houses, very often one family for every room--in one street, for instance, of fifty houses, there are one hundred and thirty families. The men are nearly all dock-labourers--the descendants of the scuffle-hunters, whose traditions still survive, perhaps, in an unconquerable hatred of government. The women and girls are s.h.i.+rt-makers, tailoresses, jam-makers, biscuit-makers, match-makers, and rope-makers.

In this parish the only gentlefolk are the clergy and the ladies working in the parish for the Church; there are no substantial shopkeepers, no private residents, no lawyer, no doctor, no professional people of any kind; there are thirty-six public-houses, or one to every hundred adults, so that if each spends on an average only two s.h.i.+llings a week, the weekly takings of each are ten pounds.

Till lately there were forty-six, but ten have been suppressed; there are no places of public entertainment, there are no books, there are hardly any papers except some of those Irish papers whose continued sufferance gives the lie to their own everlasting charges of English tyranny. Most significant of all, there are no Dissenting chapels, with one remarkable exception. Fifteen chapels in the three parishes of Ratcliff, Shadwell, and St. George's have been closed during the last twenty years. Does this mean conversion to the Anglican Church?

Not exactly; it means, first, that the people have become too poor to maintain a chapel, and next, that they have become too poor to think of religion. So long as an Englishman's head is above the grinding misery, he exercises, as he should, a free and independent choice of creeds, thereby vindicating and a.s.sorting his liberties. Here there is no chapel, therefore no one thinks; they lie like sheep; of death and its possibilities no one heeds; they live from day to day; when they are young they believe they will be always young; when they are old, so far as they know, they have been always old.

The people being such as they are--so poor, so hopeless, so ignorant--what is done for them? How are they helped upward? How are they driven, pushed, shoved, pulled, to prevent them from sinking still lower? For they are not at the lowest depths; they are not criminals; up to their lights they are honest; that poor fellow who stands with his hands ready--all he has got in the wide world--only his hands--no trade, no craft, no skill--will give you a good day's work if you engage him; he will not steal things; he will drink more than he should with the money you give him; he will knock his wife down if she angers him; but he is not a criminal. That step has yet to be taken; he will not take it; but his children may, and unless they are prevented they certainly will. For the London-born child very soon learns the meaning of the Easy Way and the Primrose Path. We have to do with the people ignorant, drunken, helpless, always at the point of dest.i.tution, their whole thoughts as much concentrated upon the difficulty of the daily bread as ever were those of their ancestor who roamed about the Middles.e.x Forest and hunted the bear with a club, and shot the wild goose with a flint-headed arrow.

First there is the Church work; that is to say, the various agencies and machinery directed by the Vicar. It may be new to some readers, especially to Americans, to learn how much of the time and thoughts of our Anglican beneficed clergymen are wanted for things not directly religious. The church, a plain and unpretending edifice, built in the year 1838, is served by the Vicar and two curates. There are daily services, and on Sundays an early celebration. The average attendance at the Sunday morning mid-day service is about one hundred; in the evening it is generally double that number. They are all adults. For the children another service is held in the Mission Room, The average attendance at the Sunday-schools and Bible-cla.s.ses is about three hundred and fifty, and would be more if the Vicar had a larger staff of teachers, of whom, however, there are forty-two. The whole number of men and women engaged in organized work connected with the Church is about one hundred and twenty-six. Some of them are ladies from the other end of London, but most belong to the parish itself; in the choir, for instance, are found a barber, a postman, a caretaker, and one or two small shopkeepers, all living in the parish, When we remember that Ratcliff is not what is called a 'show' parish, that the newspapers never talk about it, and that rich people never hear of it, this indicates a very considerable support to Church work.

In addition to the church proper there is the 'Mission Chapel,' where other services are held. One day in the week there is a sale of clothes at very low prices. They are sold rather than given, because if the women have paid a few pence for them they are less willing to p.a.w.n them than if they had received them for nothing. In the Mission Chapel are held cla.s.ses for young girls and services for children.

The churchyard, like so many of the London churchyards, has been converted into a recreation ground, where there are trees and flower-beds, and benches for old and young.

Outside the Church, but yet connected with it, there is, first, the Girls' Club. The girls of Ratcliff are all working-girls; as might be expected, a rough and wild company, as untrained as colts, yet open to kindly and considerate treatment. Their first yearning is for finery; give them a high hat with a flaring ostrich feather, a plush jacket, and a 'fringe,' and they are happy. There are seventy-five of these girls; they use their club every evening, and they have various cla.s.ses, though it cannot be said that they are desirous of learning anything. Needlework, especially, they dislike; they dance, sing, have musical drill, and read a little. Five ladies who work for the church and for the club live in the club-house, and other ladies come to lend a.s.sistance. When we consider what the homes and the companions of these girls are, what kind of men will be their husbands, and that they are to become mothers of the next generation, it seems as if one could not possibly attempt a more useful achievement than their civilization. Above all, this club stands in the way of the greatest curse of East London--the boy and girl marriage. For the elder women there are Mothers' Meetings, at which two hundred attend every week; and there are branches of the Societies for Nursing and Helping Married Women. For general purposes there is a Parish Sick and Distress Fund; a fund for giving dinners to poor children; there is a frequent distribution of fruit, vegetables, and flowers, sent up by people from the country. And for the children there is a large room which they can use as a play-room from four o'clock till half-past seven. Here they are at least warm; were it not for this room they would have to run about the cold streets; here they have games and pictures and toys. In connection with the work for the girls, help is given by the Metropolitan a.s.sociation for Befriending Young Servants, which takes charge of a good many of the girls.

For the men there is one of the inst.i.tutions called a Tee-To-Tum Club, which has a grand cafe open to everybody all day long; the members manage the club themselves; they have a concert once a week, a dramatic performance once a week, a gymnastic display once a week; on Sunday they have a lecture or an address, with a discussion after it; and they have smaller clubs attached for football, cricket, rowing, and swimming.

For the younger lads there is another club, of one hundred and sixty members; they also have their gymnasium, their football, cricket, and swimming clubs; their cla.s.ses for carpentry, wood-carving, singing, and shorthand; their savings' bank, their sick club, and their library.

Only the better cla.s.s of lads belong to this club. But there is a lower set, those who lounge about the streets at night, and take to gambling and betting. For these boys the children's play-room is opened in the evening; here they read, talk, box, and play bagstelle, draughts, and dominoes, These lads are as rough as can be found, yet on the whole they give very little trouble.

Another important inst.i.tution is the Country Holiday; this is accomplished by saving. It means, while it lasts, an expenditure of five s.h.i.+llings a week; sometimes the lads are taken to the seaside and live in a barn; sometimes the girls are sent to a village and placed about in cottages. A great number of the girls and lads go off every year a-hopping in Kent.

Add to these the temperance societies, and we seem to complete the organized work of the Church. It must, however, be remembered that this work is not confined to those who attend the services or are Anglican in name. The clergy and the ladies who help them go about the whole parish from house to house; they know all the people in every house, to whatever creed they belong; their visits are looked for as a kind of right; they are not insulted even by the roughest; they are trusted by all; as they go along the streets the children run after them and hang upon their dress; if a strange man is walking with one of these ladies, they catch at his hands and pull at his coat-tails--we judge of a man, you see, by his companions. All this machinery seems costly. It is, of course, far beyond the slender resources of the parish. It demands, however, no more than 850 a year, of which 310 is found by different societies and the sum of 540 has to be raised somehow.

There are, it has been stated, no more than seven thousand people in this parish, of whom nearly half belong to the Church of Rome. It would therefore almost seem as if every man, woman, and child in the place must be brought under the influence of all this work. In a sense all the people do feel the influence of the Church, whether they are Anglicans or not. The parish system, as you have seen, provides everything; for the men, clubs; for the women, nursing in sickness, friendly counsel always, help in trouble; the girls are brought together and kept out of mischief and encouraged in self-respect by ladies who understand what they want and how they look at things, the grown lads are taken from the streets, and, with the younger boys, are taught arts and crafts, and are trained in manly exercises just as if they were boys of Eton and Harrow. The Church services, which used to be everything, are now only a part of the parish work. The clergy are at once servants of the altar, preachers, teachers, almoners, leaders in all kinds of societies and clubs, and providers of amus.e.m.e.nts and recreation. The people look on, hold out their hands, receive, at first indifferently--but presently, one by one, awaken to a new sense.

As they receive they cannot choose but to discover that these ladies have given up their luxurious homes and the life of ease in order to work among them. They also discover that these young gentlemen who 'run' the dubs, teach the boys gymnastics, boxing, drawing, carving, and the rest, give up for this all their evenings--the flower of the day in the flower of life. What for? What do they get for it? Not in this parish only, but in every parish the same kind of thing goes on and spreads daily. This--observe--is the last step _but one_ of charity. For the progress of charity is as follows: First, there is the pitiful dole to the beggar; then the bequest to monk and monastery; then the founding of the almshouse and the parish charity; then the Easter and the Christmas offerings; then the gift to the almoner; then the cheque to a society; next--latest and best--personal service among the poor. This is both flower and fruit of charity. One thing only remains. And before long this thing also shall come to pa.s.s as well.

Those who live in the dens and witness these things done daily must be stocks and stones if they were not moved by them. They are not stocks and stones; they are actually, though slowly, moved by them; the old hatred of the Church--you may find it expressed in the working man's papers of fifty years ago--is dying out rapidly in our great towns; the brawling is better, even the drinking is diminis.h.i.+ng. And there is another--perhaps an unexpected--result. Not only are the poor turning to the Church which befriends them, the Church which they used to deride, but the clergy are turning to the poor; there are many for whom the condition of the people is above all other earthly considerations. If that great conflict--long predicted--of capital and labour ever takes place, it is safe to prophecy that the Church will not desert the poor.

Apart from the Church what machinery is at work? First, because there are so many Catholics in the place, one must think of them. It is, however, difficult to ascertain the Catholic agencies at work among these people. The people are told that they must go to ma.s.s; Roman Catholic sisters give dinners to children; there is the Roman League of the Cross--a temperance a.s.sociation; I think that the Catholics are in great measure left to the charities of the Anglicans, so long as these do not try to convert the Romans.

The Salvation Army people attempt nothing--absolutely nothing in this parish. There are at present neither Baptist, nor Wesleyan, nor Independent chapels in the place. A few years ago, on the appearance of the book called the 'Bitter Cry of Outcast London,' an attempt was made by the last-named body; they found an old chapel belonging to the Congregationalists, with an endowment of 80 a year, which they turned into a mission-hall, and carried on with spirit for two years mission work in the place; they soon obtained large funds, which they seem to have lavished with more zeal than discretion. Presently their money was all gone and they could get no more; then the chapel was turned into a night-shelter. Next It was burned to the ground. It is now rebuilt and is again a night-shelter. There is, however, an historic monument in the parish with which remains a survival of former activity. It is a Quaker meeting-house which dates back to 1667. It stands within its walls, quiet and decorous; there are the chapel, the ante-room, and the burial-ground. The congregation still meet, reduced to fifty; they still hold their Sunday-school; and not far off one of the fraternity carries on a Creche which takes care of seventy or eighty babies, and is blessed every day by as many mothers.

Considering all these agencies--how they are at work day after day, never resting, never ceasing, never relaxing their hold, always compelling the people more and more within the circle of their influence; how they incline the hearts of the children to better things and show them how to win these better things--one wonders that the whole parish is not already clad in white robes and sitting with harp and crown. On the other hand, walking down London Street, Ratcliff, looking at the foul houses, hearing the foul language, seeing the poor women with black eyes, watching the mult.i.tudinous children in the mud, one wonders whether even these agencies are enough to stem the tide and to prevent this ma.s.s of people from falling lower and lower still into the h.e.l.l of savagery. This parish is one of the poorest in London; it is one of the least known; it is one of the least visited. Explorers of slums seldom come here; it is not fas.h.i.+onably miserable. Yet all these fine things are done here, and as in this parish so in every other. It is continually stated as a mere commonplace--one may see the thing advanced everywhere, in 'thoughtful' papers, in leading articles--that the Church of Rome alone can produce its self-sacrificing martyrs, its lives of pure devotion. Then what of these parish-workers of the Church of England?

What of that young physician who worked himself to death for the children? What of the young men--not one here and there but in dozens--who give up all that young men mostly love for the sake of laborious nights among rough and rude lads? What of the gentlewomen who pa.s.s long years--give up their youth, their beauty, and their strength--among girls and women whose language is at first like a blow to them? What of the clergy themselves, always, all day long, living in the midst of the very poor--hardly paid, always giving out of their poverty, forgotten in their obscurity, far from any chance of promotion, too hard-worked to read or study, dropped out of all the old scholarly circles? Nay, my brothers, we cannot allow to the Church of Rome all the unselfish men and women. Father Damien is one of us as well. I have met him--I know him by sight--he lives and has long lived, in Riverside London.

ST. KATHERINE'S BY THE TOWER

On the 30th day of October, in the year of grace one thousand eight hundred and twenty-five, there was gathered together a congregation to a.s.sist at the mournfullest service ever heard in any church. The place was the Precinct of St. Katherine's, the church was that known as St.

Katherine's by the Tower--the most ancient and venerable church in the whole of East London--a city which now has but two ancient churches left, those of Bow and of Stepney, without counting the old tower of Hackney.

Suppose it was advertised that the last and the farewell service, before the demolition of the Abbey, would be held at Westminster on a certain day; that after the service the old church would be pulled down; that some of the monuments would be removed, the rest destroyed; that the bones of the ill.u.s.trious dead would be carted away and scattered, and that the site would be occupied by warehouses used for commercial purposes. One can picture the frantic rage and despair with which the news would everywhere be received; one can imagine the stirring of the hearts of all those who to every part of the world inherit the Anglo-Saxon speech, one can hear the sobbing and the wailing which accompany the last anthem, the last sermon, the last prayer.

St. Katherine's by the Tower was the Abbey of East London, poor and small, certainly, compared with the Cathedral church of the City and the Abbey of the West; but stately and ancient; endowed by half a dozen Sovereigns; consecrated by the memory of seven hundred years, filled with the monuments of great men and small men buried within her walls; standing in her own Precinct; with her own Courts, Spiritual and Temporal; with her own judges and officers; surrounded by the claustral buildings belonging to Master, Brethren, Sisters, and Bedeswomen. The church and the hospital had long survived the intentions of the founders; yet as they stood, so situated, so ancient, so venerable, amid a dense population of rough sailors and sailor folk, with such enormous possibilities for good and useful work, sacred and secular, one is lost in wonder that the consent of Parliament, even for purposes of gain, could be obtained for their destruction. Yet St. Katherine's was destroyed. When the voice of the preacher died away, the destroyers began their work. They pulled down the church; they hacked up the monuments, and dug up the bones; they destroyed the Master's house, and cut down the trees in his quiet orchard; they pulled down the Brothers' houses round the little ancient square; they pulled down the row of Sisters' houses and the Bedeswomen's houses; they swept the people out of the Precinct, and destroyed the streets; they pulled down the Courts, Spiritual and Temporal, and opened the doors of the prison; they grubbed up the burying ground, and with the bones and the dust of the dead, and the rubbish of the foundations, they filled up the old reservoir of the Chelsea water-works, and enabled Mr.