第6章 AS IT IS(5)

There is a darker side to this picture, on which, so far from its being any part of my purpose to conceal it, I wish to lay particular stress.In some parts of London, and in many of the manufacturing towns of England, drunkenness and profligacy in their most disgusting forms, exhibit in the open streets on Sunday, a sad and a degrading spectacle.We need go no farther than St.Giles's, or Drury Lane, for sights and scenes of a most repulsive nature.

Women with scarcely the articles of apparel which common decency requires, with forms bloated by disease, and faces rendered hideous by habitual drunkenness - men reeling and staggering along -children in rags and filth - whole streets of squalid and miserable appearance, whose inhabitants are lounging in the public road, fighting, screaming, and swearing - these are the common objects which present themselves in, these are the well-known characteristics of, that portion of London to which I have just referred.

And why is it, that all well-disposed persons are shocked, and public decency scandalised, by such exhibitions?

These people are poor - that is notorious.It may be said that they spend in liquor, money with which they might purchase necessaries, and there is no denying the fact; but let it be remembered that even if they applied every farthing of their earnings in the best possible way, they would still be very - very poor.Their dwellings are necessarily uncomfortable, and to a certain degree unhealthy.Cleanliness might do much, but they are too crowded together, the streets are too narrow, and the rooms too small, to admit of their ever being rendered desirable habitations.

They work very hard all the week.We know that the effect of prolonged and arduous labour, is to produce, when a period of rest does arrive, a sensation of lassitude which it requires the application of some stimulus to overcome.What stimulus have they?

Sunday comes, and with it a cessation of labour.How are they to employ the day, or what inducement have they to employ it, in recruiting their stock of health? They see little parties, on pleasure excursions, passing through the streets; but they cannot imitate their example, for they have not the means.They may walk, to be sure, but it is exactly the inducement to walk that they require.If every one of these men knew, that by taking the trouble to walk two or three miles he would be enabled to share in a good game of cricket, or some athletic sport, I very much question whether any of them would remain at home.

But you hold out no inducement, you offer no relief from listlessness, you provide nothing to amuse his mind, you afford him no means of exercising his body.Unwashed and unshaven, he saunters moodily about, weary and dejected.In lieu of the wholesome stimulus he might derive from nature, you drive him to the pernicious excitement to be gained from art.He flies to the gin-shop as his only resource; and when, reduced to a worse level than the lowest brute in the scale of creation, he lies wallowing in the kennel, your saintly lawgivers lift up their hands to heaven, and exclaim for a law which shall convert the day intended for rest and cheerfulness, into one of universal gloom, bigotry, and persecution.