DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.6523#0093
tell you from my own personal experience in those
cities that every land has this canker at the heart of
its civilisation, and good men and women in every
country are facing the problem that you are facing
here, sometimes under more terrible conditions, under
conditions that fortunately have not yet asserted
themselves in India.
Let me for a moment say a word on this, in order
that you may' realise that it is not only here that
one has to deal with the question of the depressed
classes. In London at the present time, according
to a very, very careful examination lasting over many
years, we are face to face with the appalling fact
that one person in every ten of that population dies
either in an asylum, a work-house, or a jail; one
in every ten ! Tou know how sometimes, where a
regiment is to be punished, that which is called
decimation is resorted to. Where all are equally guilty,
one man in every ten is taken out to suffer the death-
penalty, and in the great metropolis of our Empire
one in every ten is marked out to die in uttermost
misery and degradation—a tenth of the population
doomed to that miserable fate. We call them there
the submerged tenth, and it includes the hardest-
worked as well as the idle of our civilisation. I had
need, not so very long ago, in London, to point out some
of these facts to an audience composed principally
of the highly educated and the wealthy; and I gave
them some of the cases that I had picked out in order
cities that every land has this canker at the heart of
its civilisation, and good men and women in every
country are facing the problem that you are facing
here, sometimes under more terrible conditions, under
conditions that fortunately have not yet asserted
themselves in India.
Let me for a moment say a word on this, in order
that you may' realise that it is not only here that
one has to deal with the question of the depressed
classes. In London at the present time, according
to a very, very careful examination lasting over many
years, we are face to face with the appalling fact
that one person in every ten of that population dies
either in an asylum, a work-house, or a jail; one
in every ten ! Tou know how sometimes, where a
regiment is to be punished, that which is called
decimation is resorted to. Where all are equally guilty,
one man in every ten is taken out to suffer the death-
penalty, and in the great metropolis of our Empire
one in every ten is marked out to die in uttermost
misery and degradation—a tenth of the population
doomed to that miserable fate. We call them there
the submerged tenth, and it includes the hardest-
worked as well as the idle of our civilisation. I had
need, not so very long ago, in London, to point out some
of these facts to an audience composed principally
of the highly educated and the wealthy; and I gave
them some of the cases that I had picked out in order