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[All Rights Reserved.] STORIES OF THE POOR.

HOME LIFE AMONG THE POOR. By M. Loane, Author of " Love Stories of the Poor," etc. The highest type of home-training among the poor, its strong and its weak points, have nowhere been better described than in '" Sartor Rcsartus." "If good Passivity alone, and not good Passivity and good Activity together, were the thing wanted, then was my early position favourable beyond the most. . . . On the other tide, however, things went not so well. My Active Power was unfavourably hemmed in, of which misfortune how many traces yet abide with me ! Iv an ordinary house, where the litter of children's spoits is hateful enough, your training is too stoical ; rather to bear and forbear than to make and do. I was forbid much : wishes in any measure bold I had to renounce. . . It was rigorous, too frugal, compressively secluded, every way unscientific. Yet in that very strictness and domestic eolitude might there not lie the root of deeper earnestness, of the stem from which all noble fruit must grow? Above all, how unekilful soever, it was loving, it was well meant, honest ; whereby every deficiency was helped." For the tender and just memory of actualities shown in these few sentences, the author may well be forgiven innumerable pages of empty rant. Adam Smith, in words as applicable to the present day as to the period when they were written, justifies the austere code of morality on which these homes are based : " A single week's thoughtlessness and dissipation is often sufficient to undo a poor workman for ever." THE " HOMES " OF CARLYLE. Homes such as Carlyle pictured are to be found among superior wage-earners of all descriptions, from the dockyard man and the agricultural labourer up to the foreman getting perhaps as much as two hundred a year. One great drawback to the rigidity of the system is that if it fails with individual members of the family it fails very badly indeed, and the other is the extreme isolation in which such households live and the general unneighbourliness of their conduct, unless they should happen to belong to some evangelical and militant sect. The chief virtue that can be ehown by boys and girls at school or in workshops 'is not " They choose their friends well," but "They never pick up with no one." A mother of this type was relating to me the life and death of a son who had died about 10 years previously, aged nine, and the culminating point of her eulogy was : "He always kep' to hisself. He never brought no boys round the house." Poor little soul, he must at least have had his moments of imaginative rebellion, fo> the sin of his life, from his mother's point of view, was his telling her onee — once only — that he " would go for a soldier." .^ In these home® there is often an extreme narrowness of outlook, and the members are not seldom as indifferent to public affairs as the donkey in the fable who refused to run away when told that the enemy were coming. On my telling her of a great national disaster, a woman asked in all seriousness : " Will it do any harm to me, miss? Then why should I care? " Less austerely respectable persons often possess wider sympathies and are socially of more value. . . . If our virtues Did n<rf ?o forth of us, 'twere all alike As if we had them not. On the whole, the homes of the poor owe most to the mother, but some children would fare badly indeed if it were not for their father's constant protection. I do not mean protection against a bad mother, for there a man is practically more helpless than a woman who has given her children a bad father, but protection against a careless one. A HUSBAND'S TRIALS. A minister's wife in the north of England told me ehe was passing a work- ' man's house one afternoon, and heard such a shrill and persistent wail of "What'll Willy say? Oh— h !" that 6he opened the door and walked in. Mother and grandmother sat helplessly wringing their hands, and lying motionless on the stone floor was something that in colour and shape looked an enormous water-rat. It was the 18-months' old baby, which, while the clothes were being hung out in the back garden, had fallen into a huge tub of dirty water. To all appearance it was dead, but the minister's wife sent for a doctor, and with no assistance but the continued wail, "What'll Willy say?" set to work to try and restore breath and circulation, and in two hours' time the child was sitting up, exhausted, but otherwise little the worse for its sufferings. She gathered that the absent. Willy had frequently had reason to " say " a great deal, and in spite of entreaties hardened her heart sufficiently to leave the two women with the threat i hat unless they informed him that night what had happened, she should tell him herself the next morning. The lion does not paint the picture, and the men of the wage-earning classes suffer under the general imputation of being bad husbands and fathers, a characacter only true of a minority among them, and a continually decreasing minority. Not long ago an almost middle-aged doctor told me as if it were a never-before-heard-of thing : "Just imagine what a good fellow that Simpson is. He always lights the fire and gets his own breakfast before he goes to work." 1 The usual course when the husband has to start earlier than 7 to his work, and there are young children, is that in addition to this he should carry a cup of tea up to his wife, and put the big family kettle on so that there will be plenty of hot water when she comes down. The [ husband is rarely relieved from this duty -*uu he has a 6on or a daughter old

enough to take his place, and not always then. I accidentally found out, however, that one little girl of barely nine was expected to' get tea for her father at 6.00 even in the winter. " I can't read the clock," she told me ; "' but father showed me the way the hands is when it's time to get up and light the fire." It was an indication of unusually harsh treatment ; .nany far more serious matters soon came to the knowledge of the neighbours, and ultimately ehe had to be removed from the custody of her parents, a, step that can only be justified in extreme cases. STATE INSTITUTIONS. Few jndeed are the homes where a child does Dot live a happier and more natural life and has not a better chance of turning into a normal human being, fitted to take a part in the world as it is, and as it is very likely to remain, than in any institution that has yet been Eeen. Before aiming a single blow at home life, let us consider, what have we to put in its pl&oe? Has the State been so cucceEeful as fceter-motlier to orphan, deserted and " criminal" children that she i« justified in. wishing to displace any but the lowest and worst of parente? A woman whose age is now very little over 30 gave me a most pathetic account of her lue in one of the workhouse bar-rack-schools and tlie pain caused her by the sudden and entire separation from her two younger brothers. The children had frequently risked and sometimes in- • curred corporal punishment by speaking to one another through some railings which divided the boys' part of the building from the girle'. Needless to say, the rule that they broke had been mad© for other reasons than the desire to separate orphan brothers and sisters, ag<;d nine, seven, and five ; but it ie the kind of thing that happens when human lives are regulated on a large scale. "It was better before I left, she added simply : " brothers and sisters could meet once a month." However well State ot charitable homes for children may begin, they all slip into institutionalism. I remember one which in ten years sank from a place where the children as far as possible lived the same life as among superior cottagers, helped in the housework, minded the baby, were sent on errands to shops, and ran to school chattering and laughing, into one where no child under 12 did a stroke of work and those under 15 did very little, and where the children were compelled to walk to school two and- two in absolute'' silence, and were severely caned if they were convicted of exchanging a single word on the road. As to the value of the superintendence exercised by the committee, it was so perfunctory that a confirmed drunkard was in charge of tbe home for a- considerable period, her habits being concealed by the exertions of her assistant, and by the strajige loyalty that children will generally show to almost anyone who is not systematically unkind to them. At la6t a widower father, who had been induced to pay five shillings a week for his little daughter, called at the houee while the assistant was out, and asked to see the matron. The frightened child who an.swered the door, declared that no one " was in." ' Nonsense," said tlie man ; " thirty girls can't be left alone in a house ; and if they are they didn't ought to be." He marched into ihe sitting room, and found the matron drunk on tho floor. Naturally he went' straight to the secretary, and there was a general exposure and more careful inspection, but no radical alteration in the sj'&tem. FAMILY RESPONSIBILITY. In another " home," where the children were brought up for service, the sisters, women of gentle birth and breeding, cleaned their own boots, and their pupils were sent out into the world fo entirely ignorant of any of the conventional differences that one of them , having been shown fish knives and forks, and told to place them on the dininjr table, immediately laid them in the kitchen also for herself and her fellow-servante. Il we really loved justice, we should be no more anxious to take other people's responsibilities upon us than to fling ours upon other people. I have always endeavoured to work upon the principle &f family l-esporsibility, and have carried it out with regard to the most distant members when necessary. I once attended at i house where the yoTingest child, aged seven, had a bad attack of enteric fever. The mother was poor, but most anxious to do everything that she could. I asked her to get a mackintosh sheet, and told her that the cost would be 3s 6d. Lines of anxiety appeared on her face, for the amount was between a fifth and a sixth of the week's wages. " How many brothers and sisters have you in this town?" I inquired. "Seven," was the totally unexpected reply, for she was past 45, and the population, as a whole, shifted rapidly. "Suppose you ask each of them to give you sixpence? lam sure they will not refuse if you explain what a benefit ;t; t will be to their little niece, and how much it will lighten your own labour." In 36 hours \ the mackintosh was bought and paid for, and a very wide circle had learnt its cost and its value as a nursing accessory, while the mother had been comforted and gratified by the readiness of her own relatives to help her in a time of exceptional need. SOCIAL CONDITION OOF THE POOR. That men shall spend a certain amount of money in beer, tobacco, and halfpenny newspapers is accepted by most wives as inevitable, but if the same sums are laid out on harmless hobbies, or on books, they are sadly grudged. Even if a husband spends a little extra money in raising vegetables of a superior quality to the "passel o' rubbish" grown by his neighbours, the ordinary wife will say, in tones of melancholy resignation, "Well, it's better than the drink." In cases where the man's education is much superior to the wife's, he conceals his trifling expenditure on amusements as sedu-

lously as if they were crimes. I have read, and sometimes heard of men who lavish money on dogs and poultry while wife and children are half clothed and half starved, but I have never come across one. Possibly they bear about the same proportion to their class as the gambler or the moiphomaniac does among the rich.

I hare scarcely ever seen an indoor game of any kind played in the homes of the poor. Cards, draughts, chess, etc., are practically unknown. When they appear, they will at once be the sign and cause of a great social and moral improvement. At present there is wonderfully little voluntary exertion of mind or body among ordinary wage-earners. This inertia arises no doubt in many cases from heavy physical fatigue, but to a great extent it is ■merely a long-established habit of mind and TVody. To work hard or to do absolutely nothing is the ueual course. The poor have been taught cleanliness for centuries, and they know a great deal about it, and often practise it against fearful odds ; if they could in addition learn a little punctuality and order, the labour entailed by cleanliness and its tempersouring qualities would be reduced to a minimum. Meals are postponed indefinitely, so that "cleaning" can be finished, and then for want of door-scrapers and doormats, and for want also of domestic fdiscipline, the floor is not even dry before it is again dirty. All my sympathies go with an old sailor who said :

"I like the house clean — mod'rately, — but we must pipe reg"lar to meals.""

Permanent link to this item
Hononga pūmau ki tēnei tūemi

https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/OW19080219.2.300

Bibliographic details
Ngā taipitopito pukapuka

Otago Witness, Issue 2814, 19 February 1908, Page 82

Word count
Tapeke kupu
2,311

[All Rights Reserved.] STORIES OF THE POOR. Otago Witness, Issue 2814, 19 February 1908, Page 82

[All Rights Reserved.] STORIES OF THE POOR. Otago Witness, Issue 2814, 19 February 1908, Page 82

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