It seems the height of folly on the one hand to erect costly sanitary apparatus,[131] and on the other by insufficient inspection, and by want of enforcement of right conditions (even in "certified" houses) to actually connive at sanitary conditions below that of the class which most needs raising higher.
When one first enters a common lodging-house, one charitably hopes, in the uncertain light, that it may be a particularly good specimen of its class. Evening covers defects, but an experience of such a night reveals, as nothing else can, the essentially uncleanly nature of the arrangements. If men and women herd together in small space, with no opportunity for proper ablution, with no privacy, with all the culinary operations done in the one living room, and if, as a guarantee for care you have only the selfish interest of a proprietor who stands in small fear of the infrequent "inspection," how can things requisite for public welfare be attended to. Practically the house is no cleaner than the dirtiest person in it, and is a most ingeniously contrived hot-bed of infection.[132]
After such a night, to descend to the unswept "living-room," to see the débris of yesterday, possibly of days, lying in unsavoury dusty heaps under the tables, to watch your fellow-lodgers proceed, without washing, to cook bacon in greasy pans, half washed at the only sink, to see the clothes, worn perhaps day and night, in various stages of uncleanliness, and above all to see little children growing up untutored, save in the reverse of what we recognise as right, is to feel heart-broken for the "evils to come" that must spring from such neglect of the "stranger within our gates."
Hospitality, which has perished as a personal virtue to a large degree, must now devolve on the community. It is not to its interest that it should be neglected. Especially would I point out with all the strength I possess, the folly of indiscriminate herding together of the sexes, without the commonest precautions for decency and sanitation. If it does not pay to have in every town a lodging-house for single women, under sufficient control to secure decency, such a lodging-house should be provided. To this the married women with children might with advantage be admitted, for if a father cannot provide a decent home for his wife and children, he ought not to drag them down with him, but to be glad if they are a little better provided for. If women were accommodated apart from men, proper sanitary provision for each sex would be easier to arrange. It would be no hardship to insist on separating the sexes, for a man can always, with a little extra exertion, obtain a furnished apartment for himself and family, and though these also need careful sanitary inspection and are open to many evils, they do, at any rate, preserve a vestige of family life, and there is not that indiscriminate herding together of the sexes, which is a cover for all sorts of immorality, as well as a danger to sanitation.[133] I believe, from personal investigation, extended to towns in different parts of England, that it is exceptional to find a town that has any adequate provision for lodging single women apart from men--except as a matter of charity in more or less restricting institutions. Yet the preponderance of single women, necessitated by the excess of one sex over the other, implies, without widowhood and desertion, a floating population of women who fall an easy prey to wrong conditions. If a woman is not the carefully-guarded inmate of a sheltering home, on whom devolves the duty of caring for her? Surely on the manhood of the nation. The community that fails to shield its women to the utmost of its power will either be roused to its duty by the trumpet call of flagrant wrong, or will perish by decay of manhood and of the family.