Letters to the Editor
- THE SLUM-MAKER .
[To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.] SIR,—" J. S. L.'s". letter in your issue of December 17th, and your footnote thereto, induce me to write that I, too,
read Capt. B. S. Townroe's concise, precise, and illuminating article (Spectator, December 3rd) on the Glasgow Slum and its denizen : and read it with the greatest interest. I count it a solid gain that there is now plain recognition that the slum is made by its own denizen. A less sentimental, more critical, more according to the method of Science, measuring, classifying, comparing study of this slum-maker should now follow.
As a medical practitioner, like "J. S. L.," I, too, have had to tend professionally, and so observe, the slum denizens and their broods in the slum and in the hospital. In hospital ward or out-patient department it is possible to note the slum denizen's responses, reactions, and ideas in comparison with those of the other almost equally poor patients. I suggest that the true slum-making slum denizen is a valid sub-species • of Homo sapiens ; not, however, confined to, nor characteristic of, our industrial cities. I have tended professionally, and observed, this sub-species in the tropics—where minus "housing difficulties," and also without soot, mud, and layers of sour clothing, but withal as dirty and as verminous, it appears as "poor white trash" and as "beachcomber."
In both regions it may be disciplined and lectured ; i.e., har- ried by continual pressure into some sort of conformity with
the standards of the majority-herd among and on whom (yet not of whom) it lives as a parasite. Its offspring has grown up like the parents to repeat the parents' useless drift through life, and require the same corrective pressure. In the tropics, still, most of its offspring die before, or in, adole. cence ; but we here are doing our best, with ever-increasing success, to preserve its offspring to mature and breed, and in fact to do it early and often.
Captain Townroe has noted the probability of feeble-minded- ness in the specimen he so exactly observed and clearly described. (The portrait is brilliant, living, recognizable, and therefore true.) There exists evidence for the probability that some, at least, of this sub-species' young are like the parent, hopeless and helpless by reason of stamped-in mental defect. Perhaps this evidence is not yet in exactness and in mass sufficient to warrant action in behalf of these unfortunates qua mental defectives, unfit for everyone's sake, to be quite at large : but surely, Sir, it is now plain enough that their children are not ordinary children ; that their parental and physical environment from birth makes it obligatory, and urgent, if they may have any fair chance at all, that they be removed from parent and from environment. Thus only can they receive that special upbringing which the agencies of humane civilization, such as public health and school, cannot supply. .
, It is important to find out unmistakably and without delay how much of these unfortunates' misfortune be environmental only ; how much, if any, actually inherent in the stock. The quickest and most decent and humane way to discover this is. to change completely throughout all their childhood and adolescence. their present environment. Of course, parent and child are often diseased. So it is with the "poor white trash." This physical disease only intensifies to our eyes and hearts their pitiable and helpless condition : it does not cause that condition.
Slum-maker, poor white trash, beachcomber—each in a different climate and industrial and "housing" environment— all show clearly the same mental traits, and bodily habit and conduct. The pain of hunger, cold, heat, bodily disease, they know in varying degree. But no sign of mental distress do they ever show. They are not unhappy. They are not anxious nor, fearful nor _ashamed. They forget everything and learn nothing. They show only the weakest, if any, self-regarding sentiment. They belong to no herd but their peciliar own—they are had examples to everyone but them- selves, they are entirely unblameworthY. Only savage ignorance blames and punishes a mule, for its muliAhness.
They segregate themselves all together—in every named
slum there is the real, slum where they dwell—theether " poor" ' get away from them whenever possible. (Capt. Townroe, indeed, reported the recognition, and even adoption Of, this segregation by and for the shim-maker by the Glasg6w munier-- -pality.) It will please in to go on making their housing brighter and more spacious, slid by " visitors " of 'various sorts . (in fact, " inspectors " and disciplinary harrying) bring about some show of Order and cleanliness. The only bounds to this proeess are the depth of our purses and such limitation of breeding as may happen to the slum-makers. Probably the purse would the sooner give out—but perhaps before then we shall all see that this E;cheme of thingS is cracked, and turn to search for the flaws where they lie—hi the Mind of the slum-maker.
And if the flaws there should prove umnendable and inheri- table? No Answer need" yet be attempted. There is much first to study in, and much care to be given to, the slum- maker's child ; the weakest and the littlest of all our children. -Meanwhile, Sir, in seeking the origin of the slum-maker, the existence of his brother in mind, bodily habit, and conduct in the "poor white trash" of the tropics rules out " housing ". of any sort as a factor in his making.--I am, Sfr, &C., -
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