LONDON LARRIKINS.
PITBLIC attention in London is being now called, none . too soon, to the growth of street ruffianism, which has visibly increased during the last few years. We mean, of course, that it has increased as compared with a few years before, not as a whole compared with, say, a hundred years ago,--the era of the Gordon Riots, which were merely an outbreak of violent rowdyism on a grand scale. The Gordon Riots would be impossible in the London of to-day because the means of stamping them out at the beginning are so efficient and overwhelming. But we cannot pride ourselves on the fact that the vicious classes which made those terrible riots have disappeared. Given the occasion, and supposing that our police were as useless as the watchmen of a century ago, and our authorities as stupid, and we might experience some very ugly scenes. The actors in these scenes would be the kind of persons specimens of whom have been appearing in large batches before the Magistrates, especially in certain districts of South London. The offensive person in question is usually young, often without a settled occupation, sometimes homeless, and always one who has received the real education of his life in the streets. Allowances are to be made for him, for his environ- ment has been bad from the start. Born of parents often drunken, still more often shiftless, inefficient, idle, and ignorant, the dwelling he has been reared in is usually a satire on the word "home," he has known no discipline, no moral standard of life, he has never been taught the most elementary respect or consideration for others, his life is without any aim, no influence of a high and noble kind has ever been brought to bear upon him. We are apt, it is true, to think of cur elementary schools and our varied agencies, religious and moral, as bringing home to every one a definite moral discipline, but probably we overestimate the extent of their power. In a school of a thousand children it is almost inevitable that each child should be regarded as an " item " into whose brain certain facts are to be conveyed, and even that process ends at an early age, and the boy or girl is turned out to begin the real education of life in the London streets. We would not by any means underrate the hard, self-denying work of the teachers in our elementary schools, or ignore the fact that their work has a permanent effect on the majority. But it is the vicious minority with which we have to do, a minority foul in body and mind, accustomed from early days to vile thoughts and expressions, sent adrift into the London world from homes in which no discipline of Lny kind exists ; and we say that the slender school teaching exerts but a slight influence on the character of such. You cannot moralise people in masses, you must deal with them as separate persons, and the classes we speak of have rarely been dealt with in that way ; for as soon as they launch out on the career of the street, they not only leave school behind, but they are generally also outside the moral and religious agencies which we think so abundant.
We are so accustomed to talk in a very superficial way of something called Progress, that we insensibly slide into the belief that this progress is universal, extending to every human being. Nothing, however, can be more misleading, as we might easily reflect every time we think or hear of a crime. The criminal is not progressing ; he is, for the time at least, going back. One of the very central ideas of the evolution doctrine is "reversion to a type," and the idea is merely a generalisation of facts discovered in the world of life. Whole races of men on this planet have reverted or degenerated, have lost the faculties that lead men on to better lives, and have become victims of the deep-rooted propensities that tend to pull men down. Every kind of artificial civilisation which men have invented has, in process of time, tended to produce this type, and we cannot expect that the civilisation of London at this moment will be an exception to a world- wide rule. As soon as the degenerate or " reverted " type has gained to such a degree (as in all the older civilisations) as to become a prevalent type, that civilisation has rotted to its roots, and has filled the world with the noisome pestilence of its decay. Most, if not all, of the old civilisations had no saving remedy within themselves to prevent that decay. We believe that in our civilisation lie powerful forces that will meet and ultimately overcome our social diseases ; all social reformers, all Christian teachers and preachers, work on the assured basis of that belief, without whose inspiration we should certainly be unable to face the problems of a social order more complex than any of those known in the ancient world. How are we to apply our remedies to the phase of ugly, vicious life revealed in our huge Metropolis and in many another city besides ? No more urgent task lies upon us than this.
We must not assume that all the rough, vulgar, rowdy men and youths of the London streets are morally on the same
plane. Most have the germs of criminal tendencies, but only in a minority of cases are these developed into the black flower of crime. There are various gradations from the stupid, vulgar cad who can find no other use for his arms than to push or hit another person, and whose loud laugh proclaims his vacant mind, to the seasoned rough who is familiar to Magistrate and police. With the latter we do not concern ourselves here; inefficient though our penal system may be, we must leave him to its severity as a definite criminal. We are thinking of the young rowdy who is on the borderland of rxime, but whose misused energies may be saved and trained for the service of the community. We must think of him seriously, and not as merely a harmless young fellow who, as has been suggested, only needs some pleasant recreation in the evenings to render him a model of youthful manhood. He is not a mere playful animal, for animals never play to wound or injure one another. "Man is never a mere animal," said Coleridge in his "Table Talk "; "he is either moving upward to be an angel or downward to be a devil "; and not even the profound mind of Coleridge ever gave utterance to a deeper truth. We must treat the larrikin, therefore, as a serious case, we must think of him as a potential enemy of society, and a very dangerous one too. Yet we must not stamp him at the outset of his career with a criminal badge. We must recog- nise him as a sort of "degenerate" or "throw-back," pro- duced partly by unhappy agencies in our civilisation, which we are working to eradicate. What, then, we must ask our- selves, does such a person need to set him on the right path ? The answer is, surely, that he needs regular work, healthy surroundings, and the vigorous, ceaseless discipline of the will and the moral nature. Without entering into the problem of the human will, we may say that, in general, we should always treat men as capable of exercising moral choice; but that, in the case of those who are already perverted, and who are in imminent danger of " reversion " (if they are not already in its clutches), we should so guide the moral choice as to "make it easy to do right and difficult to do wrong,"—to use a famous phrase of Mr. Gladstone's.
Now we think the best means of solving this problem is that afforded by public labour colonies, to which the larrikin might be committed by a police Magistrate. Land for such colonies can easily be procured at the present time ; there are thousands of acres lying idle in Essex alone, where the Salvation Army Colony at Hadleigh has demonstrated, to the satisfaction of many competent observers, what can be done for the reclamation of the wastrel, as well as by providing in- dustry for the workless,—who so often tends to become the wastrel. To such a colony the street rough might be sent for one, two, or three years, according as he became moralised and industrious under its discipline. That discipline would be stern in the extreme at first, relaxing as conduct improved. Food and living would be very plain but wholesome, so as to build up the physical man ; work would consist not only in the cultivation of the soil, but in the chief manual trades, and the aim of those who controlled the colony would be that each person should leave it a trained and capable worker. Carlyle's gospel of work is not the universal • solvent he thought it, but it is very largely the solvent in the cases we are considering,—work, thorough, honest, efficient, under the most rigid discipline. Shirking would be punished severely, more obvious dishonesty more severely still. But the severity would not be social revenge, it would be the severity that is stern in order to be truly kind. The persons we are thinking of are not capable of citizenship in .their present state; to pretend that they are is to close our eyes to a grave evil. But they may be made capable, and the way lies through a stern despotism imposed on them by society for their good. Would such colonies "pay "? Not, perhaps, at first in the commercial sense. But in the higher social sense they would pay a thousandfold. Here is better work for some of our best politicians than anything they seem to be at present thinking of.
Previous page
