XV.
THE STREET BOYS OF LONDON.
ONE of the comic sights of the City is that of a guardian of the streets
making an attack upon a bevy of small boys, who are enjoying themselves in their
own wild way in some quiet corner sacred to the pursuits of trade. It may be
that the ragged urchins are pretending to be engaged in business, but X. Y. Z.
knows better, and, remembering that order is heaven's first law, and that the
aim of all good men and true is to make London as much as possible like the New
Jerusalem, he dashes in amongst the chaotic mob in the vain hope that he shall
be able to send [-281-]
them about their business. Alas! London in one respect resembles a place not
mentioned in ears polite, in that it is paved with good intentions. X. Y. Z. is
a case in point. In a fair field the chances would be in his favour. He has long
legs, he is well made, he has more than an average amount of bone and muscle,
but he is not fairly matched. Indeed, he is as much out of his element in the
contest as a bull in a china shop. He can't dodge under horses' bellies; he
can't crawl between the wheels of an omnibus or railway waggon; he can't hide
his portly form behind a letter pillar; and his pursuit is as vain as that of a
butterfly by a buffalo; and generally he does but put to rout the juvenile mob,
and resolve it into its component parts only for a time. It is not always so. A.
B. C. comes to the aid of X. Y. Z., and captures the small boy, who, to avoid
Charybdis, falls a prey to Scylla, and then the precious prize is borne away
before [-282-] the bench, and Old Jewry rejoices, for there is one little pest the less. Of
course the policeman is right. He does what I could not do. I am not a
millionaire, but it would require a very handsome sum to get me to go boy-hunting down Cheapside or in any of its adjacent streets. X. Y. Z. has less
sense of incongruity than I have, or he sees the eternal fitness of things from
a different point of view. Let me observe here the boy has also a standpoint
differing from either.
Let me take a single case. Jack Smith, as we will call him, was the son of a
Scotch piper. He was born - or he has heard his mother say so - in one of the vast
number of the courts that lead out of the Strand. His father was in the army,
but on his discharge took to playing in the streets and in public-houses for
his living till his death a few years back. As to his mother - hear this, ye
sentimentalists who say pretty things [-283-] about a mother's love !- she deserted the boy, and left him to shift for
himself. He took, of course, to selling lights and newspapers. When he got money
he lodged in the Mint, when he had not, he slept in the barges off Thames
Street. At last one morning he was caught by a policeman, and hauled before the
Lord Mayor. The latter let him off that time, but warned the boy that if he were
caught again it would be the duty of society to send him to gaol. What can such
a boy think of society? Will he be very grateful for its kindness, or very
anxious for its welfare? I think not. London, it is calculated, contains ten
thousand of these shoeless, homeless, friendless, forsaken, ragged, unwashed,
uncombed young urchins of doubtful antecedents. It is difficult to trace their
genealogies, and it is still more difficult to understand why they ever came
into existence at all. They are not a blessing either to father or mother, [-284-]and as a rule may be said to deny the existence of parental authority
altogether. "Mother dead; father gone for a soldier - a sailor "- as
the case may be- is the common result of all inquiry; and, when it is not so,
when father and mother do "turn up " - "turn up" from the
nearest gin- shop, all redolent of its perfume - it is not always to the boy's
advantage. Solomon says, "Foolishness is bound up in the heart of a
child;" he might have said the same of many who are not children; and what
is to be expected of a boy who is born and bred, as it were, in the streets of
London? I have known wise fathers have foolish sons. I have seen the children of
what are called pious people go astray. In the very city of London many are the
ministers' and clergymen's sons who kick over the traces. The crop of wild oats
sown by some of these young fellows is really astonishing. It was only the other
day that the son of the fore-[-285-]most baronet in Evangelical circles, the last scion as it were of a noble house,
stood trembling at the bar of the Old Bailey. But these children of the gutter
have never had a chance of going right. No mother has watched their every step -
no father has held up to them a living example of truth and integrity and right
-
no teacher has waited the dawning of their young intellect - no Christian
minister has moulded and guided the workings of their young hearts - the
atmosphere in which they live and move and have their being as of poverty and
crime. Mostly they run away from home, the home of the thief and the harlot and
the drunkard, and what they learn they learn in the back streets of Whitechapel,
in the filthy courts of Drury Lane, in the purlieus of St. Giles. Like
perpetuates its like. The seed of the serpent is always venomous; the tiger's
cub is always thirsting for blood. There are [-286-] gutter children in London who have risen to be merchant princes, but they
have come of an honest good family stock. As to those of whom I write, there is
a curse on them from their very birth. Happily for them, they are unconscious of
it, and yet in some undefined way it treads upon their steps. Like Gray's
naughty schoolboys:
They hear a voice in every wind,
And catch a fearful joy.
As I say, they are secretly conscious of a war between themselves and all
that is deemed respectable. They feel that society, in the shape of the
policeman, has its eye upon them. They have very restless eyes and very restless
legs. They are as unlike the primitive ploughboy of the fat fields of Suffolk,
of the swamps of Essex, of the fens of Lincolnshire, of the Sussex Downs, as can
well be imagined. You can scarcely fancy they belong to the same species; yet,
at the [-287-] same time, the street boy of the city is the same all the world over. In Paris,
in London, in Edinburgh, in Dublin, and Belfast, the dirty little ragged rascals
arc intrinsically one and the same - barring the speech. It is wonderful this
oneness of sentiment, the bonds of brotherhood. The other day, on the pier at
Boulogne, I lit a fusee for the purpose of having a smoke. Before I could say
Jack Robinson, I was beset with hordes of ragged, shoeless, unwashed urchins,
just the same as those you see in Cheapside; and it was only by bribery and
corruption that I could emancipate myself. In London, as is to be expected, we
have more of the commercial element; there is less freedom for them here. They
must turn traders, and hawk Echos and cigar-lights, or sweep crossings. As to
miscellaneous and irregular talent, society fosters it no more in the ragged boy
than it does in the well- clad man, and so we have [-288-]
got rid of the Catherine-wheel business and dangerous gymnastics of that
kind. Many boys have the vices of their breed - the vices engendered by a life of
poverty and of fear. They are afraid to be honest in their answers. They are
afraid, when you talk to them, you have got some end in view. They will watch
you, when you question them, to see how they can best please you. If you want to
see what they are, catch them flattening their noses against the eating- house
shop windows just about pudding time. That's human nature, and a wonderful thing
is human nature. It would be well if society would take the trouble to recognise
that fact. It was the want of the recognition of that fact in the good old
times, when wild lawlessness was tempered with Draconian severity, that has
entailed on the present generation the difficult problem as to what is to be
done with our street boys.
[-289-]Two solutions of the problem are offered
us - the Reformatory School and the
Refuges for Homeless and Destitute Children. According to our statisticians, in
the former seventy per cent. are reclaimed and reformed. According to the
latter, eighty per cent. are similarly improved. Mr. Williams, of Great Queen
Street, claims for his institutions that they have an advantage over the
reformatories, inasmuch as the taint of a prison attaches to the former; and
that the fact of a boy having been an inmate of one of them exerts very often a
most unfavourable influence over his prospects in life, however desirous he may
be of acting honestly and industriously. For years and years he becomes marked,
and is treated with more or less suspicion; and, when this is the case, it is
not to be wondered at if he returns to a life in which the standard of action is
very different to that of good society, and in which the most successful
criminals are the [-290-] most highly envied and applauded. The returns of the Great Queen Street
Refuge show, however, much may be done to cure the evils arising from suffering
the street boys of our day to ripen under the devil's guidance into depravity
and crime. Last year, there were admitted there 445 boys, as follows: From
various casual wards and other night- shelters, 63; on the application of
parties interested in their welfare, 95 ; on their own application, 98 ; sent in
by the secretary and subscribers from the street, 76 ; brought in by the boys'
beadle (that is, a person employed to hunt up needy cases), 17 ; sent by
magistrates and policemen, as being utterly destitute, 17; sent by London City
missionaries, ragged-school teachers, and others, 44; readmitted from the ship,
60; sent from Newsboys' Home, 29. The benefit of such an agency is still more
apparent when we remember that it is [-291-]
not much more than five years since the Chichester training-ship has been
established, and that during that time, upwards of one thousand boys have been
placed on board, and in ittle more than four years and a half the committee
have trained and placed out in the Mercantile Marine and Royal Navy as many as
seven hundred boys, all of whom, it is to be remembered, were bound to be, from
necessity, as it were, the criminal classes of society. But, after all, this is
but a drop in the bucket. It is something to do; it is a great deal to do.
England requires good sailor lads; and these lads generally, according to the
testimony of their masters, turn out such. At Faming ham, the secretary, Mr. A.
O. Charles, will show you any day three hundred street arabs all growing
respectable. England is already overstocked with incapables and scoundrels; and
these boys would have [-292-]been such had not kindly hearts and friendly hands come to the rescue. That
they can be trained and made useful we see in the number of well-conducted
blacking boys, of whom, I believe, the number is three hundred and sixty- two,
and in the little scavengers who pursue their calling almost at the very peril
of their life. In 1851 the first Shoe- black Society was formed. There are now
eight, and last year the earnings of the boys amounted to upwards of £11,000.
Only think of all this money made by London mud!
Clearly the street boy can be elevated in the scale of being. The vices of
his early life may be eradicated. The better part of him may be strengthened and
called into existence. He is not all bad, nor altogether incurable. He is what
you and I might have been, good or bad, had we been left to ourselves. It is
hard work winning him [-293-] over. It requires a patience and a wisdom such as only a few possess, but it can
be done, and it must be done, if the future of our country is to be brighter and
better than its past. Ah, he is very human, that little unwashed, uncombed,
unfed, untended nobody's child. Leave him alone, and he will be cunning as a
serpent, cruel as a wolf, like a roaring lion, ever hungering for its prey.
Grown up to a man, and not hung, he will cost the State a great deal of money,
for no man wastes property like the thief, and to try him and shut him in prison
is very costly work. It is infinitely cheaper to make an honest man of him. For
ten pounds you may plant him with a Canadian settler, who will make a man of him
in a very few years. At any rate it is unwise to treat him unkindly, to keep him
moving on, to chivy him for ever along the streets, much to the disgust of old
ladies, who are [-294-] always "dratting" those horrid boys. It is to be feared their
number is on the increase, and this, I regret to write, is the testimony of one
who ought to know. What is the reason? My informant tells me it is. diminished
parental authority. Every day, mothers and fathers come to him with boys of
tender years, whom they declare to be utterly unmanageable. Another cause
undoubtedly is our cheap and trashy literature. Recently, a great newsvendor
stated before a committee of the House of Commons, that he sold weekly one
hundred of "The Black Monk," one hundred of "Blighted
Heart," five hundred and fifty of "Claude Duval," fifty of
"The Hangman's Daughter," and three hundred and fifty of "Paul
Clifford." If you want to sec what these boys read, visit Kent Street or
the New Cut. Look at the sensational pictures of the cheap illustrated journals,
in which murder, suicide, [-295-] and crime are the staple commodities treated
of. Read some of the journals professedly written for boys, and which you
will see the boys read if you happen to pass any large establishment at the
dinner hour, and it will not be difficult to understand what street boys, if
left to themselves, are sure to become.
THE END.