CHAPTER XVIII
RECONSTRUCTING THE LIFE OF THE LABOURER IN LONDON
At the end of my long journey across Europe I returned to London. I had seen, during my visit to Denmark, some results of the reorganization of country life. In this chapter I want to tell something of what I saw and learned in London of the efforts to reconstruct the life of the Underman in the more complex conditions of a great city.
In the course of my travels through various parts of the United States, in the effort to arouse public interest in the work we are trying to do for the Negro at Tuskegee, I have frequently met persons who have inquired of me, with some anxiety, as to what, in my opinion, could be done for the city Negroes, especially that class which is entering in considerable numbers every year into the life of the larger cities in the Northern and Southern States. The people who asked this question assumed, apparently because the great majority of the Negro population lives on the plantations and in the small
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 towns of the South, that the work of a school like the Tuskegee Institute, which is located in the centre of a large Negro farming population, must be confined to the rural Negro and the South.
In reply to these inquiries I have sometimes tried to point out that a good many of the problems of the city have their sources in the country and that, perhaps, the best way to better the situation of the city Negro is to improve the condition of the masses of the race in the country. To do this, I explained, would be to attack the evil at its root, since if country life were made more attractive, the flow of population to the city would largely cease.
What is true in this respect of the masses of the Negroes in America is equally true, as I discovered, of similar classes in Europe. Any one who will take the trouble to look into the cause of European emigration will certainly be struck with the fact that the conditions of agriculture in Europe have had a marked effect on the growth and character of American cities.
This fact suggests the close connection between country conditions and the city problem, but there is still another side to the matter. The thing that was mainly impressed upon me by my observation of the lower strata of London life and the efforts that have been made to
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improve it was this: That it is a great deal simpler and, in the long run, a great deal cheaper to build up and develop a people who have grown up in the wholesome air of the open country than it is to regenerate a people who have lived all or most of their lives in the fetid atmosphere of a city slum. In other words, it is easier to deal with people who are physically and morally sound than with people who, by reason of their unhealthy and immoral surroundings, have become demoralized and degenerate. The first is a problem of education; the second, one of reconstruction and regeneration.
I think the thing that helped me most to realize the extent and the difficulty of this work of regeneration in London was the knowledge that I gained while there of the multitude of institutions and agencies, of various kinds, which are engaged in this work.
I had been impressed, during my visits to Whitechapel and other portions of the East End of London, with the number of shelters, homes, refuges, and missions of all kinds which I saw advertised as I passed along Whitechapel Road. When I inquired of Rev. John Harris, organizing secretary of the Anti-Slavery Society, who had at one time himself been engaged in mission work in that part of the city, whether it were possible to obtain a complete list of all
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 the different types of charities and institutions of social betterment in London, he placed in my hands a volume of nearly seven hundred pages devoted entirely to the classification and description of the various charities, most of which were located in London.
This book, which was called the "Annual Charities Register and Digest," I have read and studied with the greatest interest. I confess that I was amazed as well at the number and variety of the different charities as at the amount of time, energy, and money necessary to keep up and maintain them.
In another volume, "London Statistics," published by the London County Council, I found the facts about London charities concisely summarized. From these books I learned that there are something like 2,035 charitable institutions of various kinds in London alone. Perhaps I can best give some idea of the character of these institutions, a number of which date back to the eighteenth century and perhaps to still earlier periods, by giving some details from these two volumes.
There are in London, for example, 112 institutions for the blind, and 143 institutions which give medical aid in one form or another, for which the total amount of money expended is about five million seven hundred thousand
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 dollars annually. There are 214 institutions for the care of convalescents, for which the annual expenditure amounts to nearly a million and three quarters; 220 homes for children and training homes for servants, which are maintained at an annual expense of over four million dollars annually; 257 institutions for "general and specific relief," which are supported at an annual cost of nearly six millions.
There are, besides these, 159 institutions for "penitents," which receive an income of a million per year; 156 institutions for social and physical improvement, which include a multitude of the most varied sorts, as, for example, educational, temperance, and Christian associations, social settlements, boys' brigades, societies for the improvement of dwellings, for the improvement of national health, for suppression of the white slave traffic, etc. These 156 institutions are maintained at an expense of something over three million and a half dollars per year.
Finally, there are 47 so-called "spiritual" institutions which are engaged in propagating in various ways and in various forms a knowledge of the Bible and a belief in the Christian religion. Although the spiritual associations represent less than one seventeenth of the total number of charitable organizations, nearly one
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 fourth of the total amount of the charities is expended in maintaining them.
According to the best estimate that can be made, the amount of money thus expended is not less than fifty millions annually. This does not include, either, the sums collected and expended by the different churches—the Congregational, Catholic, and Established churches. In two dioceses of the Church of England—namely, those of London and Southwark—the sums raised in this way amounted to more than six hundred thousand dollars.
My attention was especially attracted by the number of shelters and refuges where homeless men, women, and children are given temporary aid of one kind and another. In addition to eight shelters maintained by the Salvation Army in different parts of the city, where homeless men and women are able to obtain a bed and something to eat, there is the asylum for the houseless poor, which claims to have given nights' lodging during the winter months to 80,000; the Free Shelter, in Ratcliffe Street East, which has given nights' lodging to 125,000; the Ham Yard Soup Kitchen and Hospice, which in 1908-1909 cared for 343 for an average of sixteen nights; the Providence Right Refuge and Home, with reports of nearly 2,100 lodgings, suppers, and breakfasts every week.
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In addition to these there is a considerable number of refuges and shelters for various classes of persons—for sailors, soldiers, Jews, Asiatics, and Africans; for ballet girls; "ladies who, on account of their conversion to the Catholic faith, are obliged to leave their homes or situations"; for "respectable female servants"; homeless boys and girls, governesses; "Protestant servants while they are seeking employment in the families of the nobility," and for "young women employed in hotels and West End clubs."
These are but a few of the many different homes, lodging houses, and shelters with which the city is provided. In most cases it is stated in connection with these institutions that vagrants are rigidly excluded, and the purpose of most of them seems to be to keep respectable but unfortunate people from going to the public workhouses.
In addition to the fifty millions and more spent in charity, nearly twenty millions more is expended by the different boroughs of London for relief to the poor in institutions and in homes. Altogether, it costs something like seventy million dollars annually to provide for the poor and unfortunate of the city.
In the Southern States, where nine of the ten million Negroes in the United States make their homes, practically nothing is spent in charity upon the Negro. In two or three states
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reformatories have been established, so that Negro children arrested for petty crimes may not be sent to the chain gangs and confined with older and more hardened criminals employed in the mines and elsewhere. At the last session of the state legislature of Alabama a bill was passed providing that the state should take over and support a reformatory for coloured children which had been established and supported by the Negro women of the state. In several of the larger Southern cities Young Men's Christian Associations have been started which are supported by charity, and in certain instances hospitals have been established.
The only purpose for which the Negro has asked or received philanthropic aid has been for the support of education. The people of the United States have been generous in their contributions to Negro education. In spite of this fact the income of all the Negro colleges, industrial schools, and other institutions of so-called higher education in the South is not one fiftieth part of what is expended every year in London in charity and relief, not for the purpose of education, but merely to rescue from worse disaster the stranded, the outcasts, and those who are already lost.[6]
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I find, as most people do, I have no doubt, that it is very hard to realize the significance of a fact that is stated in mere abstract figures. It is only after I have translated these abstractions into terms of my own experience that I am able to grasp them. That must be my excuse here for what may seem a rather far-fetched comparison.
The Negro population of the Southern States is at present about nine million. In other words, the number of Negroes in the South is just about one fourth larger than the population of Greater London, which is something over seven million. Four fifths of this Southern Negro population still live on the plantations and in the small towns.
From time to time thoughtful and interested persons—some of them, by the way, Englishmen—have visited the Southern States, talked with the white people and looked at the Negroes. Then they have gone back and written despondently, sometimes pessimistically, about the Negro problem. I wish some of these writers might study the situation of the races in the South long enough to determine what it would be possible to do there, not with seventy nor even fifty, but with one million dollars a year, provided that money were used, not for the purpose of feeding, sheltering, or protecting the
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 Negro population, for which it is not needed, but in educating them; in building up the public schools in the country districts; in providing a system of high schools, industrial and agricultural schools, such as exists, for example, in Denmark; in extending the demonstration farming to all the people on the land, and in encouraging the small colleges to adapt their teaching to the actual needs of the people so that in the course of time Negro education in the South could be gradually organized and coördinated into a single coherent system.
Perhaps I can illustrate in a broad way the difference in the situation of the poor man in the complex life of a great city like London and that of a similar class in the simpler conditions of a comparatively rural community, by a further com............