SECTION 4.—THE HOUSEHOLD SALVAGE BRIGADE (2)

Of the utilisation of much of the food which is to be so collected I shall speak hereafter, when I come to describe the second great division of my scheme, namely the Farm Colony. Much of the food collected by the Household Salvage Brigade would not be available for human consumption. In this the greatest care would be exercised, and the remainder would be dispatched, if possible, by barges down the river to the Farm Colony, where we shall meet it hereafter.

But food is only one of the materials which we should handle. At our Whitechapel Factory there is one shoemaker whom we picked off the streets destitute and miserable. He is now saved, and happy, and cobbles away at the shoe leather of his mates. That shoemaker, I foresee, is but the pioneer of a whole army of shoemakers constantly at work in repairing the cast-off boots and shoes of London. Already in some provincial towns a great business is done by the conversion of old shoes into new. They call the men so employed translators. Boots and shoes, as every wearer of them knows, do not go to pieces all at once or in all parts at once. The sole often wears out utterly, while the upper leather is quite good, or the upper leather bursts while the sole remains practically in a salvable condition; but your individual pair of shoes and boots are no good to you when any section of them is hopelessly gone to the bad. But give our trained artist in leather and his army of assistants a couple of thousand pairs of boots and shoes, and it will go ill with him if out of the couple of thousand pairs of wrecks he cannot construct five hundred pairs, which, if not quite good, will be immeasurably better than the apologies for boots which cover the feet of many a poor tramp, to say nothing of the thousands of poor children who are at the present moment attending our public schools. In some towns they have already established a Boot and Shoe Fund in order to provide the little ones who come to school with shoes warranted not to let in water between the school house and home. When you remember the 43,000 children who are reported by the School Board to attend the schools of London alone unfed and starving, do you not think there are many thousands to whom we could easily dispose, with advantage, the resurrected shoes of our Boot Factory?

This, however, is only one branch of industry. Take old umbrellas. We all know the itinerant umbrella mender, whose appearance in the neighbourhood of the farmhouse leads the good wife to look after her poultry and to see well to it that the watchdog is on the premises. But that gentleman is almost the only agency by which old umbrellas can be rescued from the dust heap. Side by side with our Boot Factory we shall have a great umbrella works. The ironwork of one umbrella will be fitted to the stick of another, and even from those that are too hopelessly gone for any further use as umbrellas we shall find plenty of use for their steels and whalebone.

So I might go on. Bottles are a fertile source of minor domestic worry. When you buy a bottle you have to pay a penny for it; but when you have emptied it you cannot get a penny back; no, nor even a farthing. You throw your empty bottle either into the dust heap, or let it lie about. But if we could collect all the waste bottles of London every day, it would go hardly with us if we could not turn a very pretty penny by washing them, sorting them, and sending them out on a new lease of life. The washing of old bottles alone will keep a considerable number of people going.

I can imagine the objection which will be raised by some shortsighted people, that by giving the old, second-hand material a new lease of life it will be said that we shall diminish the demand for new material, and so curtail work and wages at one end while we are endeavouring to piece on something at the other. This objection reminds me of a remark of a North Country pilot who, when speaking of the dulness in the shipbuilding industry, said that nothing would do any good but a series of heavy storms, which would send a goodly number of ocean-going steamers to the bottom, to replace which, this political economist thought, the yards would once more be filled with orders. This, however, is not the way in which work is supplied. Economy is a great auxiliary to trade, inasmuch as the money saved is expended on other products of industry.

There is one material that is continually increasing in quantity, which is the despair of the life of the householder and of the Local Sanitary Authority. I refer to the tins in which provisions are supplied. Nowadays everything comes to us in tins. We have coffee tins, meat tins, salmon tins, and tins ad nauseam. Tin is becoming more and more the universal envelope of the rations of man. But when you have extracted the contents of the tin what can you do with it? Huge mountains of empty tins lie about every dustyard, for as yet no man has discovered a means of utilising them when in great masses. Their market price is about four or five shillings a ton, but they are so light that it would take half a dozen trucks to hold a ton. They formerly burnt them for the sake of the solder, but now, by a new process, they are jointed without solder. The problem of the utilisation of the tins is one to which we would have to address ourselves, and I am by no means desponding as to the result.

I see in the old tins of London at least one means of establishing an industry which is at present almost monopolised by our neighbours. Most of the toys which are sold in France on New Year's Day are almost entirely made of sardine tins collected in the French capital. The toy market of England is at present far from being overstocked, for there are multitudes of children who have no toys worth speaking of with which to amuse themselves. In these empty tins I see a means of employing a large number of people in turning out cheap toys which will add a new joy to the households of the poor—the poor to whom every farthing is important, not the rich the rich can always get toys—but the children of the poor, who live in one room and have nothing to look out upon but the slum or the street. These desolate little things need our toys, and if supplied cheap enough they will take them in sufficient quantities to make it worth while to manufacture them.

A whole book might be written concerning the utilisation of the waste of London. But I am not going to write one. I hope before long to do something much better than write a book, namely, to establish an organisation to utilise the waste, and then if I describe what is being done it will be much better than by now explaining what I propose to do. But there is one more waste material to which it is necessary to allude. I refer to old newspapers and magazines, and books. Newspapers accumulate in our houses until we sometimes burn them in sheer disgust. Magazines and old books lumber our shelves until we hardly know where to turn to put a new volume. My Brigade will relieve the householder from these difficulties, and thereby become a great distributing agency of cheap literature. After the magazine has done its duty in the middle class household it can be passed on to the reading-rooms, workhouses, and hospitals. Every publication issued from the Press that is of the slightest use to men and women will, by our Scheme, acquire a double share of usefulness. It will be read first by its owner, and then by many people who would never otherwise see it.

We shall establish an immense second-hand book shop. All the best books that come into our hands will be exposed for sale, not merely at our central depots, but on the barrows of our peripatetic colporteurs, who will go from street to street with literature which, I trust, will be somewhat superior to the ordinary pabulum supplied to the poor. After we have sold all we could, and given away all that is needed to public institutions, the remainder will be carried down to our great Paper Mill, of which we shall speak later, in connection with our Farm Colony.

The Household Salvage Brigade will constitute an agency capable of being utilised to any extent for the distribution of parcels newspapers, &c. When once you have your reliable man who will call at every house with the regularity of a postman, and go his beat with the punctuality of a policeman, you can do great things with him. I do not need to elaborate this point. It will be a universal Corps of Commissionaires, created for the service of the public and in the interests of the poor, which will bring us into direct relations with every family in London, and will therefore constitute an unequalled medium for the distribution of advertisements and the collection of information.

It does not require a very fertile imagination to see that when such a house-to-house visitation is regularly established, it will develop in all directions; and working, as it would, in connection with our Anti-sweating Shops and Industrial Colony, would probably soon become the medium for negotiating sundry household repairs, from a broken window to a damaged stocking. If a porter were wanted to move furniture, or a woman wanted to do charing, or some one to clean windows or any other odd job, the ubiquitous Servant of All who called for the waste, either verbally or by postcard, would receive the order, and whoever was wanted would appear at the time desired without any further trouble on the part of the householder.

One word as to the cost. There are five hundred thousand houses in the Metropolitan Police district. To supply every house with a tub and a sack for the reception of waste would involve an initial expenditure which could not possibly be less than one shilling a house. So huge is London, and so enormous the numbers with which we shall have to deal, that this simple preliminary would require a cost of #25,000. Of course I do not propose to begin on anything like such a vast scale. That sum, which is only one of the many expenditures involved, will serve to illustrate the extent of the operations which the Household Salvage Brigade will necessitate. The enterprise is therefore beyond the reach of any but a great and powerful organisation, commanding capital and able to secure loyalty, discipline, and willing service.