Page:Navvies and Their Needs.djvu/34

 I said I would claim my reader's sympathy for navvies on the ground of facts; and surely this one fact, even if it stood alone, would be sufficient ground. But we have seen already that it does not stand alone. It is merely the description, plainer and more outspoken than usual, of the state of things in many places.

If, then, these things be so, the question is, Can anything be done to mend matters? What can be done? and to whom must we look for the doing of it? One very common reply to these questions is, "Let the clergy of the several districts in which these navvies are look to it; let them provide all that is needed—services, school, and so on—for the use of these people, who are their parishioners, if only for a time." This sounds plausible enough, and there are cases in which all this can be done, and is done. But imagine a case—such as I have seen—of a large district, with a dense population, and a small, overworked staff of clergy. The centre of the parish, in which dwell five-sixths of the whole population, is a manufacturing town, but the parish boundaries stretch far away, and enclose distant moorland hamlets, and large tracts, it may be, of almost uninhabited country. Into one of these outlying districts come the navvies. There, within the boundaries of the parish, but perhaps four or five miles from the town, is formed the navvy village, requiring a parochial organisation of its own.

In many cases the old saying holds good, and everybody's business is nobody's business. There is no lack of people to cry shame on the neglect which the navvies suffer, and to say, "Something ought to be done for these people." The difficulty is to find those who say, "This is my business; I must do something for them."