Pictures and Problems from London Police Courts. Holmes Thomas K.

I see women with bruised and battered faces, I see their cuts and wounds and putrefying sores, I hear stories of devilish cruelty, and I hear the poor bruised women pleading that their husbands may not be punished for their cruelty. ‘Don’t send him to prison! Don’t send him to prison! He is a good husband when he is sober!’ I hear the words again and again. I see more women with poor, thin clothing. I look into their faces, and I see sorrow writ large and rings of care around their eyes, and in their hearts a weight of agony that makes them ready to curse God and die. My God! and I was there to comfort them.

      I see more. I see the children old before their time, looking up with pale and piteous faces. I see some with blighted bodies, and I know that rounded limbs and happy hearts are not for them. Still more do I see: matronly women, charged with being drunk, holding in their arms little bits of mortality. Puling cries are heard, but soon hushed, for I see the little ones draw from their mothers that leprous distilment that shall blast their lives and wither their bodies. I see more: young men to whom obscenity is the breath of life and immorality the highest good. I see some young in years who have already come to the wayside of life, for their bones are full of their sin. I see young women, sometimes fair and sometimes foul to look upon, but whether fair or foul, half beast and half human. I hear stories of lust, drunkenness, and theft. I see the smartly-dressed harpies who farm them waiting to pay their fines. I see the most despicable of all mankind, the fellows who live upon them, hovering by like beasts of prey. I see old men of threescore and ten and old women of equal age, whose tottering limbs have borne them from the workhouse to the public-house, that they might drink and forget their misery once more before they die.

      I see them all; they are around me now. I breathe again the sickening whiff of stale debauch; I am faint with the unspeakable atmosphere; the chloride of lime is again in my throat, and my nostrils tingle with it. But I see more: I see the matter-of-fact way in which all this was received. I see that no one wonders at it. I see that all this is looked upon as perfectly natural, for I see no look of wonder, no divine pity, no burning indignation—all, all received as a perfect matter of course, and all, all quite as it should be.

      Now, what I saw, dear reader, on that particular Monday in that particular court you may see on any Monday in any of our Metropolitan police courts, and on any other day, only in a less degree. Year in and year out the procession of the sinning and sorrowing passes through all our courts. Prison and death thin the ranks of the procession; but the public-house is a grand recruiting agency, and neither police nor magistrates are likely to be idle, neither is the procession likely to dwindle, or the ‘yell of the trampled wife’ to cease, while the public-house holds its triumphant sway.

      But while you may see what I have described almost any day, there is much that you cannot see, and which, please God, I shall never see again. So come with me in imagination into the prisoners’ waiting-room on that particular Monday morning, for it is well you should know that some changes for the better have taken place in London police courts. Out of a long corridor thronged with policemen we turn into the waiting-room, where the prisoners, excepting some few who are in the cells, wait for their turn to appear before the magistrate. There is a long list on the wall, with the name of each prisoner and number of the officer who has charge of each case, and showing the order in which they will have to appear. Scan the list, and you will see the part drink plays in it. ‘Drunk and disorderly,’ or drunk and something else, is appended to fifty out of the sixty names on the list.

      Is it a lazar-house we are in? Oh no; it is part of an English court of justice in the Metropolis of all civilization. Never mind the sickening atmosphere, heavily laden as it is with the fumes of beer and spirits. Look around you. You feel sick and faint? You must bear up, for we want to see the prisoners. What is that lying on the floor? That is a woman; she has had a fit, and there she lies with a bag of straw under her head, and not a single woman in the place whose duty it is to attend to her. What is that cowering in the corner? Well, that has been a woman, driven years ago by the devil of sensuality into the wilderness of sin, where she took to herself other devils. But only one has her in his grip now, and he will not let her go. ‘Drink! drink! drink!’ the devil says to her, and she is a dying piece of flesh whose only capability is the absorption of alcohol. That in the other corner is reported to be a woman. She has got men’s boots on, no hat or bonnet, no jacket or mantle; her arms are bare; her dress, what there is of it, is short; her forehead is low, her broad face is cut and bruised, her eyes are inflamed, and her hair hangs loosely down. Twenty-four years of age, they say, and she has been in that corner one hundred and fifty times, and there’s another hundred to follow. Poor Kate Henessey! an Irish girl of the slum, a mother at fifteen; an Ishmaelite indeed, every man’s hand is against her, and verily hers is against every man.

      But we hear voices all around us. Listen! Fast young men are exchanging coarse obscenities with that group of ‘unfortunates,’ and no one says them nay; Listen! Business men are cursing the delay of the magistrate and the impertinence of the police, for they want to pay their fines and be gone. Listen! You hear a girl of tender years bitterly crying; you hear a doddering old woman talking to herself; you hear knowing men proclaiming the iniquities of the police; you hear the loud laugh that tells the life-history of the laugher. You hear someone faintly ask for water. Look at him, a well-dressed, middle-aged man, shaking in every limb as with palsy; he is nearly in delirium tremens. How the water gurgles down his hot throat! He does not know his name, he cannot tell whence he comes, and when put into the cells the furies will be with him and upon him.

      You hear someone crooning snatches of good music. She has been here fifty times, a woman from a home of culture. She is half drunk now, and the old songs come back to her, although she has got to the lowest depth and rolls with pleasure in her sensual sty.

      ‘Anybody got a smelling bottle?’ They might as well ask for the moon, and so the decent-looking woman faints, and well she may. It is her first appearance here. She has been picked up drunk. Shame and fear, horror and sickness, take hold of her. No female attendant, so the unfortunates take off her bonnet, unfasten the front of her dress, and rub her hands till she slowly recovers her dreadful consciousness.

      Here is a group of boys charged with gambling; here a couple of fourteen-year-old girls with being disorderly; here a mother and her babe; here a young clerk charged with embezzlement; here the old couple from the workhouse whose every returning holiday from ‘the house’ finds them in the public-house.

      Mix them up, old and young, pure and impure, male and female, drunk and sober, cleanly and verminous. Dante ought to have seen that room, have tasted that atmosphere, have listened to the various sounds in major and in minor keys. All the social problems of the day were in that room, all the vices and sorrows of life were personified in it.

      This is no exaggerated picture, not in the least is it overdrawn; I do not wish to give fuller particulars, I dare not if I would. No publisher would publish, no printer would print, an exactly faithful account of a prisoners’ waiting-room of even twelve years ago. ‘Rescue them,’ said my employers, ‘and the last day of every month a small cheque shall be your reward.’ ‘How am I to do it?’ ‘Here’s a temperance pledge-book; take pledges.’ ‘But there are others.’ ‘Give them tracts.’ ‘But there are the hungry and homeless to feed.’ ‘Give them tracts.’ ‘There are the poor wantons.’ ‘Take them to rescue homes, and let them work out their own salvation at the wash-tubs.’

      Verily, if temperance pledges, tracts, and wash-tubs could save humanity, we had had the millennium long ago. Good, religious and well-meaning people talk very serenely, and with rare unction, about engaging in ‘rescue work.’ I doubt much if they know what they talk about. Have they ever thrown themselves into the very existence of a drink or vice-possessed man or woman? Have they ever stood in front of such a one, and said, ‘Hold! You shall not go to destruction’? Have they ever taken women possessed of an unclean spirit into their own homes to try what human sympathy and timely help would do for such? If not, let them do it, and I venture to say they will hold their peace or speak with less assurance. I was afraid of my work that first day; neither did I require the phrenologist to tell me that I had made a mistake.

      But there are other parts of the police court to explore. Come to the cells. Down the corridor, past the gaoler’s office, turn to the right.