THE HUMAN REFUSE HEAP The city of Dublin provides one hideous economic object-lesson. With a population of 300,000, it offers so little opportunity to enterprise that the vast number of Dublin men cannot be included in such small manufactures as brewing, distilling, the making of soda water or biscuits. The consequence has been to convert this city of hapless industry into a viscid pool of unskilled workers, casual workers and non-workers. Hawkers, laborers, porters, paupers and their families numbered 103,081 in 1911, with a great many unemployed and unemployable included in this huge class. Coachmen, carpenters and vanmen numbered 15,380. With skilled workers' wages only 79% of London wages and food 107% the price of London food (excepting meat), the condition of the unskilled may be easily inferred. The best way to imagine it is to picture the housing conditions of Dublin. It is an old city, a fatal magnet to the rural districts. Unfortunate countrypeople still crowd up to it. Finding the poorest kind of casual labor, they swell the unemployed and the unemployable, coagulating in foul and unsuitable tenements such as disgrace no other city in the British Isles. In "houses unfit for human habitation and incapable of being rendered fit for human habitation" there were, in 1913, 22,701 persons. In "houses which are so decayed or so badly constructed as to be on or fast approaching the borderline of being unfit for human habitation," there were 37,552 persons. And in structurally sound tenements there were 27,052 persons. The 22,701 persons first mentioned were crowded into 1518 danger ous structures, anywhere up to 12 persons in one room, and in all Dublin 20,000 families out of 25,ooo families in tenements having no more than one room. 12,296 living four in a room, Where 6 families out of every thousand families in modern Belfast live in a single room, 339 families live this way in Dublin; and often the entire family sleeps in a single "bed." "Generally the only water-supply of the house," says the government report of 1914, "is furnished by a single water tap which is in the yard. . . . The closet accommodation is common, as the evidence shows, not only to the occupants of the house, but to anyone who likes to come in off the street, and is, of course, common to both sexes. Having visited a large number of these houses in all parts of the city, we have no hesitation in saying that it is no uncommon thing to find halls and landings, yards and closets of the houses in a filthy condition, and in nearly every case human excreta is to be found scattered about the yards and on the floors of the closets and in some cases even in the passages of the house itself. At the same time it is gratifying to find in a number of instances that in spite of the many drawbacks, an effort is made by the occupants to keep their rooms tidy and the walls are often decorated with pictures and when making one of our inspections after Christmas we frequently noticed an attempt to decorate for the season of the year. Having regard to the above conditions, we are prepared to accept Sir Charles Cameron's evidence, that the female inhabitants of the tenement houses seldom use the closets; indeed it would be hard to believe otherwise, as we cannot conceive how any self-respecting male or female could be expected to use accommodations such as we have seen." The rental of the tenement houses amounts to £191,509 10. o. Two-thirds of the families live on £1 a week or less-4,000 earning not more than fifteen shillings. In 1911 over 44% of the deaths among these people occurred in workhouses, hospitals, asylums and prisons. The death-rate among children of the well-to-do class in Dublin was .9. Among laborers' children, it was 12.7, fourteen times as great. A number of these Dublin workers took part in the insurrection of 1916, well-drilled and desperate men under the leadership of James Connolly. They had no illusion whatever that the nauseating condition of Dublin was a fact of the "dim past." They knew that babies in the slums of Dublin had not half the chance of cattle. They knew that incest and prostitution and syphilis accompanied that Dublin slum-life, a life of indecencies so unmentionable that no one can fully quote the government reports. But when labor joined in the insurrection of 1916, Dublin capital represented by W. M. Murphy joined heartily in calling for "justice," which did not mean decency for Dublin but merely James Connolly's blood. Dublin capital did not call in vain. In the fighting of Easter Week, James Connolly received a shattering leg-wound. He was condemned by a military tribunal for rising against the government of Ireland, and as soon as he was able to be removed from the hospital to the barrack yard he was supported to a chair and shot. THE POLITICAL LEGACY THE LAST FIFTY YEARS "FOR fifty years," declared Ernest Barker in 1917, "both of our parties each in its different way, and each according to its different lights - have sought to do justice to the grievances of Ireland; and here these hatreds of the buried past lift their menacing front and join their hands with the hatred of Germany." Mr. Barker is a fellow of New College, Oxford, and his conviction is that of a cultivated liberal. He knows Ireland's unhappy history, but he is certain that since 1867 England has met Ireland in a new spirit. He proclaims the advent of self-government for Irishmen. He believes that self-government even above good government is the ideal of the British empire, and he welcomes Ireland on the threshold of the commonwealth, the true empire: "It is, to all whose eyes are not obscured by passion, a living home of divine freedom, in which the ends of the earth are knit together not for profit, and not for power, but in the name and the hope of self-government. Ireland has waited long- too long, indeed: and yet the difficulties (difficulties, many of them, within her own borders) have been many for the day of the entering into the freedom of our common home. But the day of entering |