Nearly one-third of the citizens of London do not rise above this level. The three classes that I have described, or the mass of people who spread continuously over these classes, were found by Mr. Booth to number 1,300,000 of the four and a half million inhabitants of the city. The figure for the Greater London of to-day is, of course, immensely higher. "The submerged tenth" is a most unfortunate phrase. It leads many, who know little of these matters, to suppose that only a tenth of the inhabitants of London are very poor. The truth is that a tenth live in a condition of misery, filth, and degradation of which the ordinary decent citizen can form no conception. They are the shirkers, the abnormal, and the worst casual workers. But the life of this further million--or nearly one-fourth of the total inhabitants of the Metropolis--the irregular or badly paid workers, is a grave and accusing problem to every man of decent sentiment. Their condition is not consistent with civilisation. Certainly large numbers of them live clean and cheerful lives, but even in these cases it is scandalous that sober and willing toil should receive wage enough only to secure cleanliness and the necessaries of life; while a far larger number sink under the burden, and are dirty, intemperate, gross, and improvident.
Conceive the extension of this class all over Britain: the further vast contingents of this army of poverty in the slums of Glasgow and Liverpool and Manchester, in all our great manufacturing and shipping towns, even in the heart of pretty rural England, where the wretched wage and low standard and large family stunt and degrade our agricultural worker. It is a very serious error to imagine that this is merely an unhappy issue of the crowding in our great cities. In picturesque and highly respectable York Mr. Rowntree found that thirty per cent. of the citizens lived in very real poverty: that ten per cent. did not earn money enough to buy a normal and sufficient quantity of plain food, to say nothing of luxuries.
This is the problem of poverty. If you want it in figures, a fourth of the inhabitants of London, where rents are appalling, live on from eighteen to twenty-one shillings weekly per family, and some hundreds of thousands live on less than this. One might with some profit and pertinence go on to inquire into the life of the half of the population of London who are described as "comfortable workers." Whether the little luxuries they have are a fit reward for the hard work they usually do, whether there can be any development of distinctively human powers among them, whether we may cherish a feeling of entire security in basing our political system on that foundation, are questions worth putting; and some day they will put them to us. But it is better for the moment to confine ourselves to that pitiful fourth of the community which lives in degrading poverty because it has only irregular or wretchedly paid employment. Is it an exaggeration to suspect that this vast acreage of poverty will make the future historian hesitate to class us as civilised?