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again. Just now the daily papers contain the report of a meeting of the
Carlisle Branch of the Docker's
Union, wherein it is stated that many of the men, for months past, have not
averaged a weekly income of more than $1.00 to $1.25. The stagnated state of
the shipping industry in the port of London is held accountable for this
condition of affairs.
To the young working-man or working-woman, or married couple, there is no
assurance of happy or healthy middle life, nor of solvent old age. Work as
they will, they cannot make their future secure. It is all a matter of chance.
Everything depends upon the thing happening, the thing with which they have
nothing to do.
Precaution cannot fend it off, nor can wiles evade it. If they remain on the
industrial battlefield they must face it and take their chance against heavy
odds. Of course, if they are favorably made and are not tied by kinship
duties, they may run away from the industrial battlefield. In which event, the
safest thing the man can do is to join the army; and for the woman, possibly,
to become a Red
Cross nurse or go into a nunnery. In either case they must forego home and
children and all that makes life worth living and old age other than a
nightmare.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO.
Suicide.
England is the paradise of the rich, the purgatory of the wise, and the hell
of the poor.
-THEODORE PARKER.
WITH LIFE SO PRECARIOUS, AND opportunity for the happiness of lif e so remote,
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it is inevitable that life shall be cheap and suicide common. So common is it,
that one cannot pick up a daily paper without running across it; while an
attempt-at-suicide case in a police court excites no more interest than an
ordinary 'drunk,' and is handled with the same rapidity and unconcern.
I remember such a case in the Thames Police Court. I pride myself that I have
good eyes and ears, and a fair working knowledge of men
and things; but I confess, as I stood in that courtroom, that I was
half-bewildered by the amazing despatch with which drunks, disorderlies,
vagrants, brawlers, wife-beaters, thieves, fences, gamblers, and women of the
street went through the machine of justice.
The dock stood in the centre of the court (where the light is best), and into
it and out again stepped men, women, and children, in a stream as steady as
the stream of sentences which fell from the magistrate's lips.
I was still pondering over a consumptive 'fence' who had pleaded inability to
work and necessity for supporting wife and children, and who had received a
year at hard labor, when a young boy of about twenty appeared in the dock.
'Alfred Freeman.' I caught his name, but failed to catch the charge. A stout
and motherly-looking woman bobbed up in the witness-box and began her
testimony. Wife of the
Britannia lock-keeper, I learned she was. Time, night; a splash; she ran to
the lock and found the prisoner in the water.
I flashed my gaze from her to him. So that was the charge, self-murder. He
stood there dazed and unheeding, his bonny brown hair rumpled down his
forehead, his face haggard and care-worn and boyish still.
'Yes, sir,' the lock-keeper's wife was saying. 'As fast as I
pulled to get 'im out, 'e crawled back. Then I called for 'elp, and some
workmen 'appened along, and we got 'im out and turned 'im over to the
constable.'
The magistrate complimented the woman on her muscular powers, and the
courtroom laughed; but all I could see was a boy on the threshold of life,
passionately crawling to muddy death, and there was no laughter in it.
A man was now in the witness-box, testifying to the boy's good character and
giving extenuating evidence. He was the boy's foreman, or had been, Alfred was
a good boy, but he had had lots of trouble at home, money matters. And then
his mother was sick. He was given to worrying, and he worried over it till he
laid himself out and wasn't fit for work. He (the foreman), for the sake of
his own reputation, the boy's work being bad, had been forced to ask him to
resign.
'Anything to say?' the magistrate demanded abruptly.
The boy in the dock mumbled something indistinctly. He was still dazed.
'What does he say, constable?' the magistrate asked impatiently.
The stalwart man in blue bent his ear to the prisoner's lips, and then replied
loudly, 'He says he's very sorry, your Worship.'
'Remanded,' said his Worship; and the next case was under way, the first
witness already engaged in taking the oath. The boy, dazed and unheeding,
passed out with the jailer. That was all, five minutes from start to finish;
and two hulking brutes in the dock were trying strenuously to shift the
responsibility of the possession of a stolen fishing-pole, worth probably ten
cents.
The chief trouble with these poor folk is that they do not know how to commit
suicide, and usually have to make two or three attempts before they succeed.
This, very naturally, is a horrid nuisance to the constables and magistrates,
and gives them no end of trouble. Sometimes, however, the magistrates are
frankly outspoken about the matter, and censure the prisoners for the
slackness of their attempts. For instance, Mr. R. Sykes, chairman of
Stalybridge magistrates, in the case the other day of Ann Wood, who tried to
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make away with herself in the canal: 'If you wanted to do it, why didn't you
do it and get it done with?' demanded the indignant Mr.
Sykes. 'Why did you not get under the water and make an end of it, instead of
giving us all this trouble and bother?'
Poverty, misery, and fear of the workhouse, are the principal causes of
suicide among the working classes. 'I'll drown myself before I go into the
workhouse,' said Ellen Hughes Hunt, aged fifty-two. Last
Wednesday they held an inquest on her body at Shoreditch. Her husband came
from the Islington Workhouse to testify. He had been a cheesemonger, but
failure in business and poverty had driven him into the workhouse, whither his
wife had refused to accompany him.
She was last seen at one in the morning. Three hours later her hat and jacket
were found on the towing path by the Regent's Canal, and later her body was
fished from the water. Verdict: Suicide during temporary insanity.
Such verdicts are crimes against truth. The Law is a lie, and through it men
lie most shamelessly. For instance, a disgraced woman, forsaken and spat upon
by kith and kin, doses herself and her baby with laudanum. The baby dies; but
she pulls through after a few weeks in hospital, is charged with murder,
convicted, and sentenced to ten years' penal servitude. Recovering, the Law
holds her responsible for her actions; yet, had she died, the same Law would
have rendered a verdict of temporary insanity.
Now, considering the case of Ellen Hughes Hunt, it is as fair and logical to
say that her husband was suffering from temporary insanity when he went into
the Islington Workhouse, as it is to say that she was suffering from temporary [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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