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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, The People of the Abyss, by Jack London
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: The People of the Abyss
+
+Author: Jack London
+
+Release Date: March 20, 2005  [eBook #1688]
+[Last updated May 3, 2011]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE PEOPLE OF THE ABYSS***
+
+
+
+
+Transcribed from the Thomas Nelson and Sons edition by David Price, email
+ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
+
+
+
+
+
+THE PEOPLE OF THE ABYSS
+
+
+The chief priests and rulers cry:-
+
+   "O Lord and Master, not ours the guilt,
+   We build but as our fathers built;
+   Behold thine images how they stand
+   Sovereign and sole through all our land.
+
+   "Our task is hard--with sword and flame,
+   To hold thine earth forever the same,
+   And with sharp crooks of steel to keep,
+   Still as thou leftest them, thy sheep."
+
+   Then Christ sought out an artisan,
+   A low-browed, stunted, haggard man,
+   And a motherless girl whose fingers thin
+   Crushed from her faintly want and sin.
+
+   These set he in the midst of them,
+   And as they drew back their garment hem
+   For fear of defilement, "Lo, here," said he,
+   "The images ye have made of me."
+
+   JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL.
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+The experiences related in this volume fell to me in the summer of 1902.
+I went down into the under-world of London with an attitude of mind which
+I may best liken to that of the explorer.  I was open to be convinced by
+the evidence of my eyes, rather than by the teachings of those who had
+not seen, or by the words of those who had seen and gone before.  Further,
+I took with me certain simple criteria with which to measure the life of
+the under-world.  That which made for more life, for physical and
+spiritual health, was good; that which made for less life, which hurt,
+and dwarfed, and distorted life, was bad.
+
+It will be readily apparent to the reader that I saw much that was bad.
+Yet it must not be forgotten that the time of which I write was
+considered "good times" in England.  The starvation and lack of shelter I
+encountered constituted a chronic condition of misery which is never
+wiped out, even in the periods of greatest prosperity.
+
+Following the summer in question came a hard winter.  Great numbers of
+the unemployed formed into processions, as many as a dozen at a time, and
+daily marched through the streets of London crying for bread.  Mr. Justin
+McCarthy, writing in the month of January 1903, to the New York
+_Independent_, briefly epitomises the situation as follows:-
+
+   "The workhouses have no space left in which to pack the starving
+   crowds who are craving every day and night at their doors for food and
+   shelter.  All the charitable institutions have exhausted their means
+   in trying to raise supplies of food for the famishing residents of the
+   garrets and cellars of London lanes and alleys.  The quarters of the
+   Salvation Army in various parts of London are nightly besieged by
+   hosts of the unemployed and the hungry for whom neither shelter nor
+   the means of sustenance can be provided."
+
+It has been urged that the criticism I have passed on things as they are
+in England is too pessimistic.  I must say, in extenuation, that of
+optimists I am the most optimistic.  But I measure manhood less by
+political aggregations than by individuals.  Society grows, while
+political machines rack to pieces and become "scrap."  For the English,
+so far as manhood and womanhood and health and happiness go, I see a
+broad and smiling future.  But for a great deal of the political
+machinery, which at present mismanages for them, I see nothing else than
+the scrap heap.
+
+JACK LONDON.
+PIEDMONT, CALIFORNIA.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I--THE DESCENT
+
+
+"But you can't do it, you know," friends said, to whom I applied for
+assistance in the matter of sinking myself down into the East End of
+London.  "You had better see the police for a guide," they added, on
+second thought, painfully endeavouring to adjust themselves to the
+psychological processes of a madman who had come to them with better
+credentials than brains.
+
+"But I don't want to see the police," I protested.  "What I wish to do is
+to go down into the East End and see things for myself.  I wish to know
+how those people are living there, and why they are living there, and
+what they are living for.  In short, I am going to live there myself."
+
+"You don't want to _live_ down there!" everybody said, with
+disapprobation writ large upon their faces.  "Why, it is said there are
+places where a man's life isn't worth tu'pence."
+
+"The very places I wish to see," I broke in.
+
+"But you can't, you know," was the unfailing rejoinder.
+
+"Which is not what I came to see you about," I answered brusquely,
+somewhat nettled by their incomprehension.  "I am a stranger here, and I
+want you to tell me what you know of the East End, in order that I may
+have something to start on."
+
+"But we know nothing of the East End.  It is over there, somewhere."  And
+they waved their hands vaguely in the direction where the sun on rare
+occasions may be seen to rise.
+
+"Then I shall go to Cook's," I announced.
+
+"Oh yes," they said, with relief.  "Cook's will be sure to know."
+
+But O Cook, O Thomas Cook & Son, path-finders and trail-clearers, living
+sign-posts to all the world, and bestowers of first aid to bewildered
+travellers--unhesitatingly and instantly, with ease and celerity, could
+you send me to Darkest Africa or Innermost Thibet, but to the East End of
+London, barely a stone's throw distant from Ludgate Circus, you know not
+the way!
+
+"You can't do it, you know," said the human emporium of routes and fares
+at Cook's Cheapside branch.  "It is so--hem--so unusual."
+
+"Consult the police," he concluded authoritatively, when I had persisted.
+"We are not accustomed to taking travellers to the East End; we receive
+no call to take them there, and we know nothing whatsoever about the
+place at all."
+
+"Never mind that," I interposed, to save myself from being swept out of
+the office by his flood of negations.  "Here's something you can do for
+me.  I wish you to understand in advance what I intend doing, so that in
+case of trouble you may be able to identify me."
+
+"Ah, I see! should you be murdered, we would be in position to identify
+the corpse."
+
+He said it so cheerfully and cold-bloodedly that on the instant I saw my
+stark and mutilated cadaver stretched upon a slab where cool waters
+trickle ceaselessly, and him I saw bending over and sadly and patiently
+identifying it as the body of the insane American who _would_ see the
+East End.
+
+"No, no," I answered; "merely to identify me in case I get into a scrape
+with the 'bobbies.'"  This last I said with a thrill; truly, I was
+gripping hold of the vernacular.
+
+"That," he said, "is a matter for the consideration of the Chief Office."
+
+"It is so unprecedented, you know," he added apologetically.
+
+The man at the Chief Office hemmed and hawed.  "We make it a rule," he
+explained, "to give no information concerning our clients."
+
+"But in this case," I urged, "it is the client who requests you to give
+the information concerning himself."
+
+Again he hemmed and hawed.
+
+"Of course," I hastily anticipated, "I know it is unprecedented, but--"
+
+"As I was about to remark," he went on steadily, "it is unprecedented,
+and I don't think we can do anything for you."
+
+However, I departed with the address of a detective who lived in the East
+End, and took my way to the American consul-general.  And here, at last,
+I found a man with whom I could "do business."  There was no hemming and
+hawing, no lifted brows, open incredulity, or blank amazement.  In one
+minute I explained myself and my project, which he accepted as a matter
+of course.  In the second minute he asked my age, height, and weight, and
+looked me over.  And in the third minute, as we shook hands at parting,
+he said: "All right, Jack.  I'll remember you and keep track."
+
+I breathed a sigh of relief.  Having burnt my ships behind me, I was now
+free to plunge into that human wilderness of which nobody seemed to know
+anything.  But at once I encountered a new difficulty in the shape of my
+cabby, a grey-whiskered and eminently decorous personage who had
+imperturbably driven me for several hours about the "City."
+
+"Drive me down to the East End," I ordered, taking my seat.
+
+"Where, sir?" he demanded with frank surprise.
+
+"To the East End, anywhere.  Go on."
+
+The hansom pursued an aimless way for several minutes, then came to a
+puzzled stop.  The aperture above my head was uncovered, and the cabman
+peered down perplexedly at me.
+
+"I say," he said, "wot plyce yer wanter go?"
+
+"East End," I repeated.  "Nowhere in particular.  Just drive me around
+anywhere."
+
+"But wot's the haddress, sir?"
+
+"See here!" I thundered.  "Drive me down to the East End, and at once!"
+
+It was evident that he did not understand, but he withdrew his head, and
+grumblingly started his horse.
+
+Nowhere in the streets of London may one escape the sight of abject
+poverty, while five minutes' walk from almost any point will bring one to
+a slum; but the region my hansom was now penetrating was one unending
+slum.  The streets were filled with a new and different race of people,
+short of stature, and of wretched or beer-sodden appearance.  We rolled
+along through miles of bricks and squalor, and from each cross street and
+alley flashed long vistas of bricks and misery.  Here and there lurched a
+drunken man or woman, and the air was obscene with sounds of jangling and
+squabbling.  At a market, tottery old men and women were searching in the
+garbage thrown in the mud for rotten potatoes, beans, and vegetables,
+while little children clustered like flies around a festering mass of
+fruit, thrusting their arms to the shoulders into the liquid corruption,
+and drawing forth morsels but partially decayed, which they devoured on
+the spot.
+
+Not a hansom did I meet with in all my drive, while mine was like an
+apparition from another and better world, the way the children ran after
+it and alongside.  And as far as I could see were the solid walls of
+brick, the slimy pavements, and the screaming streets; and for the first
+time in my life the fear of the crowd smote me.  It was like the fear of
+the sea; and the miserable multitudes, street upon street, seemed so many
+waves of a vast and malodorous sea, lapping about me and threatening to
+well up and over me.
+
+"Stepney, sir; Stepney Station," the cabby called down.
+
+I looked about.  It was really a railroad station, and he had driven
+desperately to it as the one familiar spot he had ever heard of in all
+that wilderness.
+
+"Well," I said.
+
+He spluttered unintelligibly, shook his head, and looked very miserable.
+"I'm a strynger 'ere," he managed to articulate.  "An' if yer don't want
+Stepney Station, I'm blessed if I know wotcher do want."
+
+"I'll tell you what I want," I said.  "You drive along and keep your eye
+out for a shop where old clothes are sold.  Now, when you see such a
+shop, drive right on till you turn the corner, then stop and let me out."
+
+I could see that he was growing dubious of his fare, but not long
+afterwards he pulled up to the curb and informed me that an old-clothes
+shop was to be found a bit of the way back.
+
+"Won'tcher py me?" he pleaded.  "There's seven an' six owin' me."
+
+"Yes," I laughed, "and it would be the last I'd see of you."
+
+"Lord lumme, but it'll be the last I see of you if yer don't py me," he
+retorted.
+
+But a crowd of ragged onlookers had already gathered around the cab, and
+I laughed again and walked back to the old-clothes shop.
+
+Here the chief difficulty was in making the shopman understand that I
+really and truly wanted old clothes.  But after fruitless attempts to
+press upon me new and impossible coats and trousers, he began to bring to
+light heaps of old ones, looking mysterious the while and hinting darkly.
+This he did with the palpable intention of letting me know that he had
+"piped my lay," in order to bulldose me, through fear of exposure, into
+paying heavily for my purchases.  A man in trouble, or a high-class
+criminal from across the water, was what he took my measure for--in
+either case, a person anxious to avoid the police.
+
+But I disputed with him over the outrageous difference between prices and
+values, till I quite disabused him of the notion, and he settled down to
+drive a hard bargain with a hard customer.  In the end I selected a pair
+of stout though well-worn trousers, a frayed jacket with one remaining
+button, a pair of brogans which had plainly seen service where coal was
+shovelled, a thin leather belt, and a very dirty cloth cap.  My
+underclothing and socks, however, were new and warm, but of the sort that
+any American waif, down in his luck, could acquire in the ordinary course
+of events.
+
+"I must sy yer a sharp 'un," he said, with counterfeit admiration, as I
+handed over the ten shillings finally agreed upon for the outfit.
+"Blimey, if you ain't ben up an' down Petticut Lane afore now.  Yer
+trouseys is wuth five bob to hany man, an' a docker 'ud give two an' six
+for the shoes, to sy nothin' of the coat an' cap an' new stoker's singlet
+an' hother things."
+
+"How much will you give me for them?" I demanded suddenly.  "I paid you
+ten bob for the lot, and I'll sell them back to you, right now, for
+eight!  Come, it's a go!"
+
+But he grinned and shook his head, and though I had made a good bargain,
+I was unpleasantly aware that he had made a better one.
+
+I found the cabby and a policeman with their heads together, but the
+latter, after looking me over sharply, and particularly scrutinizing the
+bundle under my arm, turned away and left the cabby to wax mutinous by
+himself.  And not a step would he budge till I paid him the seven
+shillings and sixpence owing him.  Whereupon he was willing to drive me
+to the ends of the earth, apologising profusely for his insistence, and
+explaining that one ran across queer customers in London Town.
+
+But he drove me only to Highbury Vale, in North London, where my luggage
+was waiting for me.  Here, next day, I took off my shoes (not without
+regret for their lightness and comfort), and my soft, grey travelling
+suit, and, in fact, all my clothing; and proceeded to array myself in the
+clothes of the other and unimaginable men, who must have been indeed
+unfortunate to have had to part with such rags for the pitiable sums
+obtainable from a dealer.
+
+Inside my stoker's singlet, in the armpit, I sewed a gold sovereign (an
+emergency sum certainly of modest proportions); and inside my stoker's
+singlet I put myself.  And then I sat down and moralised upon the fair
+years and fat, which had made my skin soft and brought the nerves close
+to the surface; for the singlet was rough and raspy as a hair shirt, and
+I am confident that the most rigorous of ascetics suffer no more than I
+did in the ensuing twenty-four hours.
+
+The remainder of my costume was fairly easy to put on, though the
+brogans, or brogues, were quite a problem.  As stiff and hard as if made
+of wood, it was only after a prolonged pounding of the uppers with my
+fists that I was able to get my feet into them at all.  Then, with a few
+shillings, a knife, a handkerchief, and some brown papers and flake
+tobacco stowed away in my pockets, I thumped down the stairs and said
+good-bye to my foreboding friends.  As I paused out of the door, the
+"help," a comely middle-aged woman, could not conquer a grin that twisted
+her lips and separated them till the throat, out of involuntary sympathy,
+made the uncouth animal noises we are wont to designate as "laughter."
+
+No sooner was I out on the streets than I was impressed by the difference
+in status effected by my clothes.  All servility vanished from the
+demeanour of the common people with whom I came in contact.  Presto! in
+the twinkling of an eye, so to say, I had become one of them.  My frayed
+and out-at-elbows jacket was the badge and advertisement of my class,
+which was their class.  It made me of like kind, and in place of the
+fawning and too respectful attention I had hitherto received, I now
+shared with them a comradeship.  The man in corduroy and dirty
+neckerchief no longer addressed me as "sir" or "governor."  It was "mate"
+now--and a fine and hearty word, with a tingle to it, and a warmth and
+gladness, which the other term does not possess.  Governor!  It smacks of
+mastery, and power, and high authority--the tribute of the man who is
+under to the man on top, delivered in the hope that he will let up a bit
+and ease his weight, which is another way of saying that it is an appeal
+for alms.
+
+This brings me to a delight I experienced in my rags and tatters which is
+denied the average American abroad.  The European traveller from the
+States, who is not a Croesus, speedily finds himself reduced to a chronic
+state of self-conscious sordidness by the hordes of cringing robbers who
+clutter his steps from dawn till dark, and deplete his pocket-book in a
+way that puts compound interest to the blush.
+
+In my rags and tatters I escaped the pestilence of tipping, and
+encountered men on a basis of equality.  Nay, before the day was out I
+turned the tables, and said, most gratefully, "Thank you, sir," to a
+gentleman whose horse I held, and who dropped a penny into my eager palm.
+
+Other changes I discovered were wrought in my condition by my new garb.
+In crossing crowded thoroughfares I found I had to be, if anything, more
+lively in avoiding vehicles, and it was strikingly impressed upon me that
+my life had cheapened in direct ratio with my clothes.  When before I
+inquired the way of a policeman, I was usually asked, "Bus or 'ansom,
+sir?"  But now the query became, "Walk or ride?"  Also, at the railway
+stations, a third-class ticket was now shoved out to me as a matter of
+course.
+
+But there was compensation for it all.  For the first time I met the
+English lower classes face to face, and knew them for what they were.
+When loungers and workmen, at street corners and in public-houses, talked
+with me, they talked as one man to another, and they talked as natural
+men should talk, without the least idea of getting anything out of me for
+what they talked or the way they talked.
+
+And when at last I made into the East End, I was gratified to find that
+the fear of the crowd no longer haunted me.  I had become a part of it.
+The vast and malodorous sea had welled up and over me, or I had slipped
+gently into it, and there was nothing fearsome about it--with the one
+exception of the stoker's singlet.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II--JOHNNY UPRIGHT
+
+
+I shall not give you the address of Johnny Upright.  Let it suffice that
+he lives in the most respectable street in the East End--a street that
+would be considered very mean in America, but a veritable oasis in the
+desert of East London.  It is surrounded on every side by close-packed
+squalor and streets jammed by a young and vile and dirty generation; but
+its own pavements are comparatively bare of the children who have no
+other place to play, while it has an air of desertion, so few are the
+people that come and go.
+
+Each house in this street, as in all the streets, is shoulder to shoulder
+with its neighbours.  To each house there is but one entrance, the front
+door; and each house is about eighteen feet wide, with a bit of a brick-
+walled yard behind, where, when it is not raining, one may look at a
+slate-coloured sky.  But it must be understood that this is East End
+opulence we are now considering.  Some of the people in this street are
+even so well-to-do as to keep a "slavey."  Johnny Upright keeps one, as I
+well know, she being my first acquaintance in this particular portion of
+the world.
+
+To Johnny Upright's house I came, and to the door came the "slavey."  Now,
+mark you, her position in life was pitiable and contemptible, but it was
+with pity and contempt that she looked at me.  She evinced a plain desire
+that our conversation should be short.  It was Sunday, and Johnny Upright
+was not at home, and that was all there was to it.  But I lingered,
+discussing whether or not it was all there was to it, till Mrs. Johnny
+Upright was attracted to the door, where she scolded the girl for not
+having closed it before turning her attention to me.
+
+No, Mr. Johnny Upright was not at home, and further, he saw nobody on
+Sunday.  It is too bad, said I.  Was I looking for work?  No, quite the
+contrary; in fact, I had come to see Johnny Upright on business which
+might be profitable to him.
+
+A change came over the face of things at once.  The gentleman in question
+was at church, but would be home in an hour or thereabouts, when no doubt
+he could be seen.
+
+Would I kindly step in?--no, the lady did not ask me, though I fished for
+an invitation by stating that I would go down to the corner and wait in a
+public-house.  And down to the corner I went, but, it being church time,
+the "pub" was closed.  A miserable drizzle was falling, and, in lieu of
+better, I took a seat on a neighbourly doorstep and waited.
+
+And here to the doorstep came the "slavey," very frowzy and very
+perplexed, to tell me that the missus would let me come back and wait in
+the kitchen.
+
+"So many people come 'ere lookin' for work," Mrs. Johnny Upright
+apologetically explained.  "So I 'ope you won't feel bad the way I
+spoke."
+
+"Not at all, not at all," I replied in my grandest manner, for the nonce
+investing my rags with dignity.  "I quite understand, I assure you.  I
+suppose people looking for work almost worry you to death?"
+
+"That they do," she answered, with an eloquent and expressive glance; and
+thereupon ushered me into, not the kitchen, but the dining room--a
+favour, I took it, in recompense for my grand manner.
+
+This dining-room, on the same floor as the kitchen, was about four feet
+below the level of the ground, and so dark (it was midday) that I had to
+wait a space for my eyes to adjust themselves to the gloom.  Dirty light
+filtered in through a window, the top of which was on a level with a
+sidewalk, and in this light I found that I was able to read newspaper
+print.
+
+And here, while waiting the coming of Johnny Upright, let me explain my
+errand.  While living, eating, and sleeping with the people of the East
+End, it was my intention to have a port of refuge, not too far distant,
+into which could run now and again to assure myself that good clothes and
+cleanliness still existed.  Also in such port I could receive my mail,
+work up my notes, and sally forth occasionally in changed garb to
+civilisation.
+
+But this involved a dilemma.  A lodging where my property would be safe
+implied a landlady apt to be suspicious of a gentleman leading a double
+life; while a landlady who would not bother her head over the double life
+of her lodgers would imply lodgings where property was unsafe.  To avoid
+the dilemma was what had brought me to Johnny Upright.  A detective of
+thirty-odd years' continuous service in the East End, known far and wide
+by a name given him by a convicted felon in the dock, he was just the man
+to find me an honest landlady, and make her rest easy concerning the
+strange comings and goings of which I might be guilty.
+
+His two daughters beat him home from church--and pretty girls they were
+in their Sunday dresses; withal it was the certain weak and delicate
+prettiness which characterises the Cockney lasses, a prettiness which is
+no more than a promise with no grip on time, and doomed to fade quickly
+away like the colour from a sunset sky.
+
+They looked me over with frank curiosity, as though I were some sort of a
+strange animal, and then ignored me utterly for the rest of my wait.  Then
+Johnny Upright himself arrived, and I was summoned upstairs to confer
+with him.
+
+"Speak loud," he interrupted my opening words.  "I've got a bad cold, and
+I can't hear well."
+
+Shades of Old Sleuth and Sherlock Holmes!  I wondered as to where the
+assistant was located whose duty it was to take down whatever information
+I might loudly vouchsafe.  And to this day, much as I have seen of Johnny
+Upright and much as I have puzzled over the incident, I have never been
+quite able to make up my mind as to whether or not he had a cold, or had
+an assistant planted in the other room.  But of one thing I am sure:
+though I gave Johnny Upright the facts concerning myself and project, he
+withheld judgment till next day, when I dodged into his street
+conventionally garbed and in a hansom.  Then his greeting was cordial
+enough, and I went down into the dining-room to join the family at tea.
+
+"We are humble here," he said, "not given to the flesh, and you must take
+us for what we are, in our humble way."
+
+The girls were flushed and embarrassed at greeting me, while he did not
+make it any the easier for them.
+
+"Ha! ha!" he roared heartily, slapping the table with his open hand till
+the dishes rang.  "The girls thought yesterday you had come to ask for a
+piece of bread!  Ha! ha! ho! ho! ho!"
+
+This they indignantly denied, with snapping eyes and guilty red cheeks,
+as though it were an essential of true refinement to be able to discern
+under his rags a man who had no need to go ragged.
+
+And then, while I ate bread and marmalade, proceeded a play at cross
+purposes, the daughters deeming it an insult to me that I should have
+been mistaken for a beggar, and the father considering it as the highest
+compliment to my cleverness to succeed in being so mistaken.  All of
+which I enjoyed, and the bread, the marmalade, and the tea, till the time
+came for Johnny Upright to find me a lodging, which he did, not half-a-
+dozen doors away, in his own respectable and opulent street, in a house
+as like to his own as a pea to its mate.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III--MY LODGING AND SOME OTHERS
+
+
+From an East London standpoint, the room I rented for six shillings, or a
+dollar and a half, per week, was a most comfortable affair.  From the
+American standpoint, on the other hand, it was rudely furnished,
+uncomfortable, and small.  By the time I had added an ordinary typewriter
+table to its scanty furnishing, I was hard put to turn around; at the
+best, I managed to navigate it by a sort of vermicular progression
+requiring great dexterity and presence of mind.
+
+Having settled myself, or my property rather, I put on my knockabout
+clothes and went out for a walk.  Lodgings being fresh in my mind, I
+began to look them up, bearing in mind the hypothesis that I was a poor
+young man with a wife and large family.
+
+My first discovery was that empty houses were few and far between--so far
+between, in fact, that though I walked miles in irregular circles over a
+large area, I still remained between.  Not one empty house could I find--a
+conclusive proof that the district was "saturated."
+
+It being plain that as a poor young man with a family I could rent no
+houses at all in this most undesirable region, I next looked for rooms,
+unfurnished rooms, in which I could store my wife and babies and
+chattels.  There were not many, but I found them, usually in the
+singular, for one appears to be considered sufficient for a poor man's
+family in which to cook and eat and sleep.  When I asked for two rooms,
+the sublettees looked at me very much in the manner, I imagine, that a
+certain personage looked at Oliver Twist when he asked for more.
+
+Not only was one room deemed sufficient for a poor man and his family,
+but I learned that many families, occupying single rooms, had so much
+space to spare as to be able to take in a lodger or two.  When such rooms
+can be rented for from three to six shillings per week, it is a fair
+conclusion that a lodger with references should obtain floor space for,
+say, from eightpence to a shilling.  He may even be able to board with
+the sublettees for a few shillings more.  This, however, I failed to
+inquire into--a reprehensible error on my part, considering that I was
+working on the basis of a hypothetical family.
+
+Not only did the houses I investigated have no bath-tubs, but I learned
+that there were no bath-tubs in all the thousands of houses I had seen.
+Under the circumstances, with my wife and babies and a couple of lodgers
+suffering from the too great spaciousness of one room, taking a bath in a
+tin wash-basin would be an unfeasible undertaking.  But, it seems, the
+compensation comes in with the saving of soap, so all's well, and God's
+still in heaven.
+
+However, I rented no rooms, but returned to my own Johnny Upright's
+street.  What with my wife, and babies, and lodgers, and the various
+cubby-holes into which I had fitted them, my mind's eye had become narrow-
+angled, and I could not quite take in all of my own room at once.  The
+immensity of it was awe-inspiring.  Could this be the room I had rented
+for six shillings a week?  Impossible!  But my landlady, knocking at the
+door to learn if I were comfortable, dispelled my doubts.
+
+"Oh yes, sir," she said, in reply to a question.  "This street is the
+very last.  All the other streets were like this eight or ten years ago,
+and all the people were very respectable.  But the others have driven our
+kind out.  Those in this street are the only ones left.  It's shocking,
+sir!"
+
+And then she explained the process of saturation, by which the rental
+value of a neighbourhood went up, while its tone went down.
+
+"You see, sir, our kind are not used to crowding in the way the others
+do.  We need more room.  The others, the foreigners and lower-class
+people, can get five and six families into this house, where we only get
+one.  So they can pay more rent for the house than we can afford.  It
+_is_ shocking, sir; and just to think, only a few years ago all this
+neighbourhood was just as nice as it could be."
+
+I looked at her.  Here was a woman, of the finest grade of the English
+working-class, with numerous evidences of refinement, being slowly
+engulfed by that noisome and rotten tide of humanity which the powers
+that be are pouring eastward out of London Town.  Bank, factory, hotel,
+and office building must go up, and the city poor folk are a nomadic
+breed; so they migrate eastward, wave upon wave, saturating and degrading
+neighbourhood by neighbourhood, driving the better class of workers
+before them to pioneer, on the rim of the city, or dragging them down, if
+not in the first generation, surely in the second and third.
+
+It is only a question of months when Johnny Upright's street must go.  He
+realises it himself.
+
+"In a couple of years," he says, "my lease expires.  My landlord is one
+of our kind.  He has not put up the rent on any of his houses here, and
+this has enabled us to stay.  But any day he may sell, or any day he may
+die, which is the same thing so far as we are concerned.  The house is
+bought by a money breeder, who builds a sweat shop on the patch of ground
+at the rear where my grapevine is, adds to the house, and rents it a room
+to a family.  There you are, and Johnny Upright's gone!"
+
+And truly I saw Johnny Upright, and his good wife and fair daughters, and
+frowzy slavey, like so many ghosts flitting eastward through the gloom,
+the monster city roaring at their heels.
+
+But Johnny Upright is not alone in his flitting.  Far, far out, on the
+fringe of the city, live the small business men, little managers, and
+successful clerks.  They dwell in cottages and semi-detached villas, with
+bits of flower garden, and elbow room, and breathing space.  They inflate
+themselves with pride, and throw out their chests when they contemplate
+the Abyss from which they have escaped, and they thank God that they are
+not as other men.  And lo! down upon them comes Johnny Upright and the
+monster city at his heels.  Tenements spring up like magic, gardens are
+built upon, villas are divided and subdivided into many dwellings, and
+the black night of London settles down in a greasy pall.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV--A MAN AND THE ABYSS
+
+
+"I say, can you let a lodging?"
+
+These words I discharged carelessly over my shoulder at a stout and
+elderly woman, of whose fare I was partaking in a greasy coffee-house
+down near the Pool and not very far from Limehouse.
+
+"Oh yus," she answered shortly, my appearance possibly not approximating
+the standard of affluence required by her house.
+
+I said no more, consuming my rasher of bacon and pint of sickly tea in
+silence.  Nor did she take further interest in me till I came to pay my
+reckoning (fourpence), when I pulled all of ten shillings out of my
+pocket.  The expected result was produced.
+
+"Yus, sir," she at once volunteered; "I 'ave nice lodgin's you'd likely
+tyke a fancy to.  Back from a voyage, sir?"
+
+"How much for a room?" I inquired, ignoring her curiosity.
+
+She looked me up and down with frank surprise.  "I don't let rooms, not
+to my reg'lar lodgers, much less casuals."
+
+"Then I'll have to look along a bit," I said, with marked disappointment.
+
+But the sight of my ten shillings had made her keen.  "I can let you have
+a nice bed in with two hother men," she urged.  "Good, respectable men,
+an' steady."
+
+"But I don't want to sleep with two other men," I objected.
+
+"You don't 'ave to.  There's three beds in the room, an' hit's not a very
+small room."
+
+"How much?" I demanded.
+
+"'Arf a crown a week, two an' six, to a regular lodger.  You'll fancy the
+men, I'm sure.  One works in the ware'ouse, an' 'e's been with me two
+years now.  An' the hother's bin with me six--six years, sir, an' two
+months comin' nex' Saturday.  'E's a scene-shifter," she went on.  "A
+steady, respectable man, never missin' a night's work in the time 'e's
+bin with me.  An' 'e likes the 'ouse; 'e says as it's the best 'e can do
+in the w'y of lodgin's.  I board 'im, an' the hother lodgers too."
+
+"I suppose he's saving money right along," I insinuated innocently.
+
+"Bless you, no!  Nor can 'e do as well helsewhere with 'is money."
+
+And I thought of my own spacious West, with room under its sky and
+unlimited air for a thousand Londons; and here was this man, a steady and
+reliable man, never missing a night's work, frugal and honest, lodging in
+one room with two other men, paying two dollars and a half per month for
+it, and out of his experience adjudging it to be the best he could do!
+And here was I, on the strength of the ten shillings in my pocket, able
+to enter in with my rags and take up my bed with him.  The human soul is
+a lonely thing, but it must be very lonely sometimes when there are three
+beds to a room, and casuals with ten shillings are admitted.
+
+"How long have you been here?" I asked.
+
+"Thirteen years, sir; an' don't you think you'll fancy the lodgin'?"
+
+The while she talked she was shuffling ponderously about the small
+kitchen in which she cooked the food for her lodgers who were also
+boarders.  When I first entered, she had been hard at work, nor had she
+let up once throughout the conversation.  Undoubtedly she was a busy
+woman.  "Up at half-past five," "to bed the last thing at night,"
+"workin' fit ter drop," thirteen years of it, and for reward, grey hairs,
+frowzy clothes, stooped shoulders, slatternly figure, unending toil in a
+foul and noisome coffee-house that faced on an alley ten feet between the
+walls, and a waterside environment that was ugly and sickening, to say
+the least.
+
+"You'll be hin hagain to 'ave a look?" she questioned wistfully, as I
+went out of the door.
+
+And as I turned and looked at her, I realized to the full the deeper
+truth underlying that very wise old maxim: "Virtue is its own reward."
+
+I went back to her.  "Have you ever taken a vacation?" I asked.
+
+"Vycytion!"
+
+"A trip to the country for a couple of days, fresh air, a day off, you
+know, a rest."
+
+"Lor' lumme!" she laughed, for the first time stopping from her work.  "A
+vycytion, eh? for the likes o' me?  Just fancy, now!--Mind yer
+feet!"--this last sharply, and to me, as I stumbled over the rotten
+threshold.
+
+Down near the West India Dock I came upon a young fellow staring
+disconsolately at the muddy water.  A fireman's cap was pulled down
+across his eyes, and the fit and sag of his clothes whispered
+unmistakably of the sea.
+
+"Hello, mate," I greeted him, sparring for a beginning.  "Can you tell me
+the way to Wapping?"
+
+"Worked yer way over on a cattle boat?" he countered, fixing my
+nationality on the instant.
+
+And thereupon we entered upon a talk that extended itself to a public-
+house and a couple of pints of "arf an' arf."  This led to closer
+intimacy, so that when I brought to light all of a shilling's worth of
+coppers (ostensibly my all), and put aside sixpence for a bed, and
+sixpence for more arf an' arf, he generously proposed that we drink up
+the whole shilling.
+
+"My mate, 'e cut up rough las' night," he explained.  "An' the bobbies
+got 'm, so you can bunk in wi' me.  Wotcher say?"
+
+I said yes, and by the time we had soaked ourselves in a whole shilling's
+worth of beer, and slept the night on a miserable bed in a miserable den,
+I knew him pretty fairly for what he was.  And that in one respect he was
+representative of a large body of the lower-class London workman, my
+later experience substantiates.
+
+He was London-born, his father a fireman and a drinker before him.  As a
+child, his home was the streets and the docks.  He had never learned to
+read, and had never felt the need for it--a vain and useless
+accomplishment, he held, at least for a man of his station in life.
+
+He had had a mother and numerous squalling brothers and sisters, all
+crammed into a couple of rooms and living on poorer and less regular food
+than he could ordinarily rustle for himself.  In fact, he never went home
+except at periods when he was unfortunate in procuring his own food.
+Petty pilfering and begging along the streets and docks, a trip or two to
+sea as mess-boy, a few trips more as coal-trimmer, and then a
+full-fledged fireman, he had reached the top of his life.
+
+And in the course of this he had also hammered out a philosophy of life,
+an ugly and repulsive philosophy, but withal a very logical and sensible
+one from his point of view.  When I asked him what he lived for, he
+immediately answered, "Booze."  A voyage to sea (for a man must live and
+get the wherewithal), and then the paying off and the big drunk at the
+end.  After that, haphazard little drunks, sponged in the "pubs" from
+mates with a few coppers left, like myself, and when sponging was played
+out another trip to sea and a repetition of the beastly cycle.
+
+"But women," I suggested, when he had finished proclaiming booze the sole
+end of existence.
+
+"Wimmen!"  He thumped his pot upon the bar and orated eloquently.  "Wimmen
+is a thing my edication 'as learnt me t' let alone.  It don't pay, matey;
+it don't pay.  Wot's a man like me want o' wimmen, eh? jest you tell me.
+There was my mar, she was enough, a-bangin' the kids about an' makin' the
+ole man mis'rable when 'e come 'ome, w'ich was seldom, I grant.  An' fer
+w'y?  Becos o' mar!  She didn't make 'is 'ome 'appy, that was w'y.  Then,
+there's the other wimmen, 'ow do they treat a pore stoker with a few
+shillin's in 'is trouseys?  A good drunk is wot 'e's got in 'is pockits,
+a good long drunk, an' the wimmen skin 'im out of his money so quick 'e
+ain't 'ad 'ardly a glass.  I know.  I've 'ad my fling, an' I know wot's
+wot.  An' I tell you, where's wimmen is trouble--screechin' an' carryin'
+on, fightin', cuttin', bobbies, magistrates, an' a month's 'ard labour
+back of it all, an' no pay-day when you come out."
+
+"But a wife and children," I insisted.  "A home of your own, and all
+that.  Think of it, back from a voyage, little children climbing on your
+knee, and the wife happy and smiling, and a kiss for you when she lays
+the table, and a kiss all round from the babies when they go to bed, and
+the kettle singing and the long talk afterwards of where you've been and
+what you've seen, and of her and all the little happenings at home while
+you've been away, and--"
+
+"Garn!" he cried, with a playful shove of his fist on my shoulder.  "Wot's
+yer game, eh?  A missus kissin' an' kids clim'in', an' kettle singin',
+all on four poun' ten a month w'en you 'ave a ship, an' four nothin' w'en
+you 'aven't.  I'll tell you wot I'd get on four poun' ten--a missus
+rowin', kids squallin', no coal t' make the kettle sing, an' the kettle
+up the spout, that's wot I'd get.  Enough t' make a bloke bloomin' well
+glad to be back t' sea.  A missus!  Wot for?  T' make you mis'rable?
+Kids?  Jest take my counsel, matey, an' don't 'ave 'em.  Look at me!  I
+can 'ave my beer w'en I like, an' no blessed missus an' kids a-crying for
+bread.  I'm 'appy, I am, with my beer an' mates like you, an' a good ship
+comin', an' another trip to sea.  So I say, let's 'ave another pint.  Arf
+an' arf's good enough for me."
+
+Without going further with the speech of this young fellow of two-and-
+twenty, I think I have sufficiently indicated his philosophy of life and
+the underlying economic reason for it.  Home life he had never known.  The
+word "home" aroused nothing but unpleasant associations.  In the low
+wages of his father, and of other men in the same walk in life, he found
+sufficient reason for branding wife and children as encumbrances and
+causes of masculine misery.  An unconscious hedonist, utterly unmoral and
+materialistic, he sought the greatest possible happiness for himself, and
+found it in drink.
+
+A young sot; a premature wreck; physical inability to do a stoker's work;
+the gutter or the workhouse; and the end--he saw it all as clearly as I,
+but it held no terrors for him.  From the moment of his birth, all the
+forces of his environment had tended to harden him, and he viewed his
+wretched, inevitable future with a callousness and unconcern I could not
+shake.
+
+And yet he was not a bad man.  He was not inherently vicious and brutal.
+He had normal mentality, and a more than average physique.  His eyes were
+blue and round, shaded by long lashes, and wide apart.  And there was a
+laugh in them, and a fund of humour behind.  The brow and general
+features were good, the mouth and lips sweet, though already developing a
+harsh twist.  The chin was weak, but not too weak; I have seen men
+sitting in the high places with weaker.
+
+His head was shapely, and so gracefully was it poised upon a perfect neck
+that I was not surprised by his body that night when he stripped for bed.
+I have seen many men strip, in gymnasium and training quarters, men of
+good blood and upbringing, but I have never seen one who stripped to
+better advantage than this young sot of two-and-twenty, this young god
+doomed to rack and ruin in four or five short years, and to pass hence
+without posterity to receive the splendid heritage it was his to
+bequeath.
+
+It seemed sacrilege to waste such life, and yet I was forced to confess
+that he was right in not marrying on four pounds ten in London Town.  Just
+as the scene-shifter was happier in making both ends meet in a room
+shared with two other men, than he would have been had he packed a feeble
+family along with a couple of men into a cheaper room, and failed in
+making both ends meet.
+
+And day by day I became convinced that not only is it unwise, but it is
+criminal for the people of the Abyss to marry.  They are the stones by
+the builder rejected.  There is no place for them, in the social fabric,
+while all the forces of society drive them downward till they perish.  At
+the bottom of the Abyss they are feeble, besotted, and imbecile.  If they
+reproduce, the life is so cheap that perforce it perishes of itself.  The
+work of the world goes on above them, and they do not care to take part
+in it, nor are they able.  Moreover, the work of the world does not need
+them.  There are plenty, far fitter than they, clinging to the steep
+slope above, and struggling frantically to slide no more.
+
+In short, the London Abyss is a vast shambles.  Year by year, and decade
+after decade, rural England pours in a flood of vigorous strong life,
+that not only does not renew itself, but perishes by the third
+generation.  Competent authorities aver that the London workman whose
+parents and grand-parents were born in London is so remarkable a specimen
+that he is rarely found.
+
+Mr. A. C. Pigou has said that the aged poor, and the residuum which
+compose the "submerged tenth," constitute 71 per cent, of the population
+of London.  Which is to say that last year, and yesterday, and to-day, at
+this very moment, 450,000 of these creatures are dying miserably at the
+bottom of the social pit called "London."  As to how they die, I shall
+take an instance from this morning's paper.
+
+   SELF-NEGLECT
+
+   Yesterday Dr. Wynn Westcott held an inquest at Shoreditch, respecting
+   the death of Elizabeth Crews, aged 77 years, of 32 East Street,
+   Holborn, who died on Wednesday last.  Alice Mathieson stated that she
+   was landlady of the house where deceased lived.  Witness last saw her
+   alive on the previous Monday.  She lived quite alone.  Mr. Francis
+   Birch, relieving officer for the Holborn district, stated that
+   deceased had occupied the room in question for thirty-five years.  When
+   witness was called, on the 1st, he found the old woman in a terrible
+   state, and the ambulance and coachman had to be disinfected after the
+   removal.  Dr. Chase Fennell said death was due to blood-poisoning from
+   bed-sores, due to self-neglect and filthy surroundings, and the jury
+   returned a verdict to that effect.
+
+The most startling thing about this little incident of a woman's death is
+the smug complacency with which the officials looked upon it and rendered
+judgment.  That an old woman of seventy-seven years of age should die of
+SELF-NEGLECT is the most optimistic way possible of looking at it.  It
+was the old dead woman's fault that she died, and having located the
+responsibility, society goes contentedly on about its own affairs.
+
+Of the "submerged tenth" Mr. Pigou has said: "Either through lack of
+bodily strength, or of intelligence, or of fibre, or of all three, they
+are inefficient or unwilling workers, and consequently unable to support
+themselves . . . They are often so degraded in intellect as to be
+incapable of distinguishing their right from their left hand, or of
+recognising the numbers of their own houses; their bodies are feeble and
+without stamina, their affections are warped, and they scarcely know what
+family life means."
+
+Four hundred and fifty thousand is a whole lot of people.  The young
+fireman was only one, and it took him some time to say his little say.  I
+should not like to hear them all talk at once.  I wonder if God hears
+them?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V--THOSE ON THE EDGE
+
+
+My first impression of East London was naturally a general one.  Later
+the details began to appear, and here and there in the chaos of misery I
+found little spots where a fair measure of happiness reigned--sometimes
+whole rows of houses in little out-of-the-way streets, where artisans
+dwell and where a rude sort of family life obtains.  In the evenings the
+men can be seen at the doors, pipes in their mouths and children on their
+knees, wives gossiping, and laughter and fun going on.  The content of
+these people is manifestly great, for, relative to the wretchedness that
+encompasses them, they are well off.
+
+But at the best, it is a dull, animal happiness, the content of the full
+belly.  The dominant note of their lives is materialistic.  They are
+stupid and heavy, without imagination.  The Abyss seems to exude a
+stupefying atmosphere of torpor, which wraps about them and deadens them.
+Religion passes them by.  The Unseen holds for them neither terror nor
+delight.  They are unaware of the Unseen; and the full belly and the
+evening pipe, with their regular "arf an' arf," is all they demand, or
+dream of demanding, from existence.
+
+This would not be so bad if it were all; but it is not all.  The
+satisfied torpor in which they are sunk is the deadly inertia that
+precedes dissolution.  There is no progress, and with them not to
+progress is to fall back and into the Abyss.  In their own lives they may
+only start to fall, leaving the fall to be completed by their children
+and their children's children.  Man always gets less than he demands from
+life; and so little do they demand, that the less than little they get
+cannot save them.
+
+At the best, city life is an unnatural life for the human; but the city
+life of London is so utterly unnatural that the average workman or
+workwoman cannot stand it.  Mind and body are sapped by the undermining
+influences ceaselessly at work.  Moral and physical stamina are broken,
+and the good workman, fresh from the soil, becomes in the first city
+generation a poor workman; and by the second city generation, devoid of
+push and go and initiative, and actually unable physically to perform the
+labour his father did, he is well on the way to the shambles at the
+bottom of the Abyss.
+
+If nothing else, the air he breathes, and from which he never escapes, is
+sufficient to weaken him mentally and physically, so that he becomes
+unable to compete with the fresh virile life from the country hastening
+on to London Town to destroy and be destroyed.
+
+Leaving out the disease germs that fill the air of the East End, consider
+but the one item of smoke.  Sir William Thiselton-Dyer, curator of Kew
+Gardens, has been studying smoke deposits on vegetation, and, according
+to his calculations, no less than six tons of solid matter, consisting of
+soot and tarry hydrocarbons, are deposited every week on every quarter of
+a square mile in and about London.  This is equivalent to twenty-four
+tons per week to the square mile, or 1248 tons per year to the square
+mile.  From the cornice below the dome of St. Paul's Cathedral was
+recently taken a solid deposit of crystallised sulphate of lime.  This
+deposit had been formed by the action of the sulphuric acid in the
+atmosphere upon the carbonate of lime in the stone.  And this sulphuric
+acid in the atmosphere is constantly being breathed by the London workmen
+through all the days and nights of their lives.
+
+It is incontrovertible that the children grow up into rotten adults,
+without virility or stamina, a weak-kneed, narrow-chested, listless
+breed, that crumples up and goes down in the brute struggle for life with
+the invading hordes from the country.  The railway men, carriers, omnibus
+drivers, corn and timber porters, and all those who require physical
+stamina, are largely drawn from the country; while in the Metropolitan
+Police there are, roughly, 12,000 country-born as against 3000 London-
+born.
+
+So one is forced to conclude that the Abyss is literally a huge
+man-killing machine, and when I pass along the little out-of-the-way
+streets with the full-bellied artisans at the doors, I am aware of a
+greater sorrow for them than for the 450,000 lost and hopeless wretches
+dying at the bottom of the pit.  They, at least, are dying, that is the
+point; while these have yet to go through the slow and preliminary pangs
+extending through two and even three generations.
+
+And yet the quality of the life is good.  All human potentialities are in
+it.  Given proper conditions, it could live through the centuries, and
+great men, heroes and masters, spring from it and make the world better
+by having lived.
+
+I talked with a woman who was representative of that type which has been
+jerked out of its little out-of-the-way streets and has started on the
+fatal fall to the bottom.  Her husband was a fitter and a member of the
+Engineers' Union.  That he was a poor engineer was evidenced by his
+inability to get regular employment.  He did not have the energy and
+enterprise necessary to obtain or hold a steady position.
+
+The pair had two daughters, and the four of them lived in a couple of
+holes, called "rooms" by courtesy, for which they paid seven shillings
+per week.  They possessed no stove, managing their cooking on a single
+gas-ring in the fireplace.  Not being persons of property, they were
+unable to obtain an unlimited supply of gas; but a clever machine had
+been installed for their benefit.  By dropping a penny in the slot, the
+gas was forthcoming, and when a penny's worth had forthcome the supply
+was automatically shut off.  "A penny gawn in no time," she explained,
+"an' the cookin' not arf done!"
+
+Incipient starvation had been their portion for years.  Month in and
+month out, they had arisen from the table able and willing to eat more.
+And when once on the downward slope, chronic innutrition is an important
+factor in sapping vitality and hastening the descent.
+
+Yet this woman was a hard worker.  From 4.30 in the morning till the last
+light at night, she said, she had toiled at making cloth dress-skirts,
+lined up and with two flounces, for seven shillings a dozen.  Cloth dress-
+skirts, mark you, lined up with two flounces, for seven shillings a
+dozen!  This is equal to $1.75 per dozen, or 14.75 cents per skirt.
+
+The husband, in order to obtain employment, had to belong to the union,
+which collected one shilling and sixpence from him each week.  Also, when
+strikes were afoot and he chanced to be working, he had at times been
+compelled to pay as high as seventeen shillings into the union's coffers
+for the relief fund.
+
+One daughter, the elder, had worked as green hand for a dressmaker, for
+one shilling and sixpence per week--37.5 cents per week, or a fraction
+over 5 cents per day.  However, when the slack season came she was
+discharged, though she had been taken on at such low pay with the
+understanding that she was to learn the trade and work up.  After that
+she had been employed in a bicycle store for three years, for which she
+received five shillings per week, walking two miles to her work, and two
+back, and being fined for tardiness.
+
+As far as the man and woman were concerned, the game was played.  They
+had lost handhold and foothold, and were falling into the pit.  But what
+of the daughters?  Living like swine, enfeebled by chronic innutrition,
+being sapped mentally, morally, and physically, what chance have they to
+crawl up and out of the Abyss into which they were born falling?
+
+As I write this, and for an hour past, the air has been made hideous by a
+free-for-all, rough-and-tumble fight going on in the yard that is back to
+back with my yard.  When the first sounds reached me I took it for the
+barking and snarling of dogs, and some minutes were required to convince
+me that human beings, and women at that, could produce such a fearful
+clamour.
+
+Drunken women fighting!  It is not nice to think of; it is far worse to
+listen to.  Something like this it runs--
+
+Incoherent babble, shrieked at the top of the lungs of several women; a
+lull, in which is heard a child crying and a young girl's voice pleading
+tearfully; a woman's voice rises, harsh and grating, "You 'it me!  Jest
+you 'it me!" then, swat! challenge accepted and fight rages afresh.
+
+The back windows of the houses commanding the scene are lined with
+enthusiastic spectators, and the sound of blows, and of oaths that make
+one's blood run cold, are borne to my ears.  Happily, I cannot see the
+combatants.
+
+A lull; "You let that child alone!" child, evidently of few years,
+screaming in downright terror.  "Awright," repeated insistently and at
+top pitch twenty times straight running; "you'll git this rock on the
+'ead!" and then rock evidently on the head from the shriek that goes up.
+
+A lull; apparently one combatant temporarily disabled and being
+resuscitated; child's voice audible again, but now sunk to a lower note
+of terror and growing exhaustion.
+
+Voices begin to go up the scale, something like this:-
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"Yes!"
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"Yes!"
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"Yes!"
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"Yes!"
+
+Sufficient affirmation on both sides, conflict again precipitated.  One
+combatant gets overwhelming advantage, and follows it up from the way the
+other combatant screams bloody murder.  Bloody murder gurgles and dies
+out, undoubtedly throttled by a strangle hold.
+
+Entrance of new voices; a flank attack; strangle hold suddenly broken
+from the way bloody murder goes up half an octave higher than before;
+general hullaballoo, everybody fighting.
+
+Lull; new voice, young girl's, "I'm goin' ter tyke my mother's part;"
+dialogue, repeated about five times, "I'll do as I like, blankety, blank,
+blank!"  "I'd like ter see yer, blankety, blank, blank!" renewed
+conflict, mothers, daughters, everybody, during which my landlady calls
+her young daughter in from the back steps, while I wonder what will be
+the effect of all that she has heard upon her moral fibre.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI--FRYING-PAN ALLEY AND A GLIMPSE OF INFERNO
+
+
+Three of us walked down Mile End Road, and one was a hero.  He was a
+slender lad of nineteen, so slight and frail, in fact, that, like Fra
+Lippo Lippi, a puff of wind might double him up and turn him over.  He
+was a burning young socialist, in the first throes of enthusiasm and ripe
+for martyrdom.  As platform speaker or chairman he had taken an active
+and dangerous part in the many indoor and outdoor pro-Boer meetings which
+have vexed the serenity of Merry England these several years back.  Little
+items he had been imparting to me as he walked along; of being mobbed in
+parks and on tram-cars; of climbing on the platform to lead the forlorn
+hope, when brother speaker after brother speaker had been dragged down by
+the angry crowd and cruelly beaten; of a siege in a church, where he and
+three others had taken sanctuary, and where, amid flying missiles and the
+crashing of stained glass, they had fought off the mob till rescued by
+platoons of constables; of pitched and giddy battles on stairways,
+galleries, and balconies; of smashed windows, collapsed stairways,
+wrecked lecture halls, and broken heads and bones--and then, with a
+regretful sigh, he looked at me and said: "How I envy you big, strong
+men!  I'm such a little mite I can't do much when it comes to fighting."
+
+And I, walking head and shoulders above my two companions, remembered my
+own husky West, and the stalwart men it had been my custom, in turn, to
+envy there.  Also, as I looked at the mite of a youth with the heart of a
+lion, I thought, this is the type that on occasion rears barricades and
+shows the world that men have not forgotten how to die.
+
+But up spoke my other companion, a man of twenty-eight, who eked out a
+precarious existence in a sweating den.
+
+"I'm a 'earty man, I am," he announced.  "Not like the other chaps at my
+shop, I ain't.  They consider me a fine specimen of manhood.  W'y, d' ye
+know, I weigh ten stone!"
+
+I was ashamed to tell him that I weighed one hundred and seventy pounds,
+or over twelve stone, so I contented myself with taking his measure.
+Poor, misshapen little man!  His skin an unhealthy colour, body gnarled
+and twisted out of all decency, contracted chest, shoulders bent
+prodigiously from long hours of toil, and head hanging heavily forward
+and out of place!  A "'earty man,' 'e was!"
+
+"How tall are you?"
+
+"Five foot two," he answered proudly; "an' the chaps at the shop . . . "
+
+"Let me see that shop," I said.
+
+The shop was idle just then, but I still desired to see it.  Passing
+Leman Street, we cut off to the left into Spitalfields, and dived into
+Frying-pan Alley.  A spawn of children cluttered the slimy pavement, for
+all the world like tadpoles just turned frogs on the bottom of a dry
+pond.  In a narrow doorway, so narrow that perforce we stepped over her,
+sat a woman with a young babe, nursing at breasts grossly naked and
+libelling all the sacredness of motherhood.  In the black and narrow hall
+behind her we waded through a mess of young life, and essayed an even
+narrower and fouler stairway.  Up we went, three flights, each landing
+two feet by three in area, and heaped with filth and refuse.
+
+There were seven rooms in this abomination called a house.  In six of the
+rooms, twenty-odd people, of both sexes and all ages, cooked, ate, slept,
+and worked.  In size the rooms averaged eight feet by eight, or possibly
+nine.  The seventh room we entered.  It was the den in which five men
+"sweated."  It was seven feet wide by eight long, and the table at which
+the work was performed took up the major portion of the space.  On this
+table were five lasts, and there was barely room for the men to stand to
+their work, for the rest of the space was heaped with cardboard, leather,
+bundles of shoe uppers, and a miscellaneous assortment of materials used
+in attaching the uppers of shoes to their soles.
+
+In the adjoining room lived a woman and six children.  In another vile
+hole lived a widow, with an only son of sixteen who was dying of
+consumption.  The woman hawked sweetmeats on the street, I was told, and
+more often failed than not to supply her son with the three quarts of
+milk he daily required.  Further, this son, weak and dying, did not taste
+meat oftener than once a week; and the kind and quality of this meat
+cannot possibly be imagined by people who have never watched human swine
+eat.
+
+"The w'y 'e coughs is somethin' terrible," volunteered my sweated friend,
+referring to the dying boy.  "We 'ear 'im 'ere, w'ile we're workin', an'
+it's terrible, I say, terrible!"
+
+And, what of the coughing and the sweetmeats, I found another menace
+added to the hostile environment of the children of the slum.
+
+My sweated friend, when work was to be had, toiled with four other men in
+his eight-by-seven room.  In the winter a lamp burned nearly all the day
+and added its fumes to the over-loaded air, which was breathed, and
+breathed, and breathed again.
+
+In good times, when there was a rush of work, this man told me that he
+could earn as high as "thirty bob a week."--Thirty shillings!  Seven
+dollars and a half!
+
+"But it's only the best of us can do it," he qualified.  "An' then we
+work twelve, thirteen, and fourteen hours a day, just as fast as we can.
+An' you should see us sweat!  Just running from us!  If you could see us,
+it'd dazzle your eyes--tacks flyin' out of mouth like from a machine.
+Look at my mouth."
+
+I looked.  The teeth were worn down by the constant friction of the
+metallic brads, while they were coal-black and rotten.
+
+"I clean my teeth," he added, "else they'd be worse."
+
+After he had told me that the workers had to furnish their own tools,
+brads, "grindery," cardboard, rent, light, and what not, it was plain
+that his thirty bob was a diminishing quantity.
+
+"But how long does the rush season last, in which you receive this high
+wage of thirty bob?" I asked.
+
+"Four months," was the answer; and for the rest of the year, he informed
+me, they average from "half a quid" to a "quid" a week, which is
+equivalent to from two dollars and a half to five dollars.  The present
+week was half gone, and he had earned four bob, or one dollar.  And yet I
+was given to understand that this was one of the better grades of
+sweating.
+
+I looked out of the window, which should have commanded the back yards of
+the neighbouring buildings.  But there were no back yards, or, rather,
+they were covered with one-storey hovels, cowsheds, in which people
+lived.  The roofs of these hovels were covered with deposits of filth, in
+some places a couple of feet deep--the contributions from the back
+windows of the second and third storeys.  I could make out fish and meat
+bones, garbage, pestilential rags, old boots, broken earthenware, and all
+the general refuse of a human sty.
+
+"This is the last year of this trade; they're getting machines to do away
+with us," said the sweated one mournfully, as we stepped over the woman
+with the breasts grossly naked and waded anew through the cheap young
+life.
+
+We next visited the municipal dwellings erected by the London County
+Council on the site of the slums where lived Arthur Morrison's "Child of
+the Jago."  While the buildings housed more people than before, it was
+much healthier.  But the dwellings were inhabited by the better-class
+workmen and artisans.  The slum people had simply drifted on to crowd
+other slums or to form new slums.
+
+"An' now," said the sweated one, the 'earty man who worked so fast as to
+dazzle one's eyes, "I'll show you one of London's lungs.  This is
+Spitalfields Garden."  And he mouthed the word "garden" with scorn.
+
+The shadow of Christ's Church falls across Spitalfields Garden, and in
+the shadow of Christ's Church, at three o'clock in the afternoon, I saw a
+sight I never wish to see again.  There are no flowers in this garden,
+which is smaller than my own rose garden at home.  Grass only grows here,
+and it is surrounded by a sharp-spiked iron fencing, as are all the parks
+of London Town, so that homeless men and women may not come in at night
+and sleep upon it.
+
+As we entered the garden, an old woman, between fifty and sixty, passed
+us, striding with sturdy intention if somewhat rickety action, with two
+bulky bundles, covered with sacking, slung fore and aft upon her.  She
+was a woman tramp, a houseless soul, too independent to drag her failing
+carcass through the workhouse door.  Like the snail, she carried her home
+with her.  In the two sacking-covered bundles were her household goods,
+her wardrobe, linen, and dear feminine possessions.
+
+We went up the narrow gravelled walk.  On the benches on either side
+arrayed a mass of miserable and distorted humanity, the sight of which
+would have impelled Dore to more diabolical flights of fancy than he ever
+succeeded in achieving.  It was a welter of rags and filth, of all manner
+of loathsome skin diseases, open sores, bruises, grossness, indecency,
+leering monstrosities, and bestial faces.  A chill, raw wind was blowing,
+and these creatures huddled there in their rags, sleeping for the most
+part, or trying to sleep.  Here were a dozen women, ranging in age from
+twenty years to seventy.  Next a babe, possibly of nine months, lying
+asleep, flat on the hard bench, with neither pillow nor covering, nor
+with any one looking after it.  Next half-a-dozen men, sleeping bolt
+upright or leaning against one another in their sleep.  In one place a
+family group, a child asleep in its sleeping mother's arms, and the
+husband (or male mate) clumsily mending a dilapidated shoe.  On another
+bench a woman trimming the frayed strips of her rags with a knife, and
+another woman, with thread and needle, sewing up rents.  Adjoining, a man
+holding a sleeping woman in his arms.  Farther on, a man, his clothing
+caked with gutter mud, asleep, with head in the lap of a woman, not more
+than twenty-five years old, and also asleep.
+
+It was this sleeping that puzzled me.  Why were nine out of ten of them
+asleep or trying to sleep?  But it was not till afterwards that I
+learned.  _It is a law of the powers that be that the homeless shall not
+sleep by night_.  On the pavement, by the portico of Christ's Church,
+where the stone pillars rise toward the sky in a stately row, were whole
+rows of men lying asleep or drowsing, and all too deep sunk in torpor to
+rouse or be made curious by our intrusion.
+
+"A lung of London," I said; "nay, an abscess, a great putrescent sore."
+
+"Oh, why did you bring me here?" demanded the burning young socialist,
+his delicate face white with sickness of soul and stomach sickness.
+
+"Those women there," said our guide, "will sell themselves for
+thru'pence, or tu'pence, or a loaf of stale bread."
+
+He said it with a cheerful sneer.
+
+But what more he might have said I do not know, for the sick man cried,
+"For heaven's sake let us get out of this."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII--A WINNER OF THE VICTORIA CROSS
+
+
+I have found that it is not easy to get into the casual ward of the
+workhouse.  I have made two attempts now, and I shall shortly make a
+third.  The first time I started out at seven o'clock in the evening with
+four shillings in my pocket.  Herein I committed two errors.  In the
+first place, the applicant for admission to the casual ward must be
+destitute, and as he is subjected to a rigorous search, he must really be
+destitute; and fourpence, much less four shillings, is sufficient
+affluence to disqualify him.  In the second place, I made the mistake of
+tardiness.  Seven o'clock in the evening is too late in the day for a
+pauper to get a pauper's bed.
+
+For the benefit of gently nurtured and innocent folk, let me explain what
+a ward is.  It is a building where the homeless, bedless, penniless man,
+if he be lucky, may _casually_ rest his weary bones, and then work like a
+navvy next day to pay for it.
+
+My second attempt to break into the casual ward began more auspiciously.
+I started in the middle of the afternoon, accompanied by the burning
+young socialist and another friend, and all I had in my pocket was
+thru'pence.  They piloted me to the Whitechapel Workhouse, at which I
+peered from around a friendly corner.  It was a few minutes past five in
+the afternoon but already a long and melancholy line was formed, which
+strung out around the corner of the building and out of sight.
+
+It was a most woeful picture, men and women waiting in the cold grey end
+of the day for a pauper's shelter from the night, and I confess it almost
+unnerved me.  Like the boy before the dentist's door, I suddenly
+discovered a multitude of reasons for being elsewhere.  Some hints of the
+struggle going on within must have shown in my face, for one of my
+companions said, "Don't funk; you can do it."
+
+Of course I could do it, but I became aware that even thru'pence in my
+pocket was too lordly a treasure for such a throng; and, in order that
+all invidious distinctions might be removed, I emptied out the coppers.
+Then I bade good-bye to my friends, and with my heart going pit-a-pat,
+slouched down the street and took my place at the end of the line.  Woeful
+it looked, this line of poor folk tottering on the steep pitch to death;
+how woeful it was I did not dream.
+
+Next to me stood a short, stout man.  Hale and hearty, though aged,
+strong-featured, with the tough and leathery skin produced by long years
+of sunbeat and weatherbeat, his was the unmistakable sea face and eyes;
+and at once there came to me a bit of Kipling's "Galley Slave":-
+
+   "By the brand upon my shoulder, by the gall of clinging steel;
+   By the welt the whips have left me, by the scars that never heal;
+   By eyes grown old with staring through the sun-wash on the brine,
+   I am paid in full for service . . . "
+
+How correct I was in my surmise, and how peculiarly appropriate the verse
+was, you shall learn.
+
+"I won't stand it much longer, I won't," he was complaining to the man on
+the other side of him.  "I'll smash a windy, a big 'un, an' get run in
+for fourteen days.  Then I'll have a good place to sleep, never fear, an'
+better grub than you get here.  Though I'd miss my bit of bacey"--this as
+an after-thought, and said regretfully and resignedly.
+
+"I've been out two nights now," he went on; "wet to the skin night before
+last, an' I can't stand it much longer.  I'm gettin' old, an' some
+mornin' they'll pick me up dead."
+
+He whirled with fierce passion on me: "Don't you ever let yourself grow
+old, lad.  Die when you're young, or you'll come to this.  I'm tellin'
+you sure.  Seven an' eighty years am I, an' served my country like a man.
+Three good-conduct stripes and the Victoria Cross, an' this is what I get
+for it.  I wish I was dead, I wish I was dead.  Can't come any too quick
+for me, I tell you."
+
+The moisture rushed into his eyes, but, before the other man could
+comfort him, he began to hum a lilting sea song as though there was no
+such thing as heartbreak in the world.
+
+Given encouragement, this is the story he told while waiting in line at
+the workhouse after two nights of exposure in the streets.
+
+As a boy he had enlisted in the British navy, and for two score years and
+more served faithfully and well.  Names, dates, commanders, ports, ships,
+engagements, and battles, rolled from his lips in a steady stream, but it
+is beyond me to remember them all, for it is not quite in keeping to take
+notes at the poorhouse door.  He had been through the "First War in
+China," as he termed it; had enlisted with the East India Company and
+served ten years in India; was back in India again, in the English navy,
+at the time of the Mutiny; had served in the Burmese War and in the
+Crimea; and all this in addition to having fought and toiled for the
+English flag pretty well over the rest of the globe.
+
+Then the thing happened.  A little thing, it could only be traced back to
+first causes: perhaps the lieutenant's breakfast had not agreed with him;
+or he had been up late the night before; or his debts were pressing; or
+the commander had spoken brusquely to him.  The point is, that on this
+particular day the lieutenant was irritable.  The sailor, with others,
+was "setting up" the fore rigging.
+
+Now, mark you, the sailor had been over forty years in the navy, had
+three good-conduct stripes, and possessed the Victoria Cross for
+distinguished service in battle; so he could not have been such an
+altogether bad sort of a sailorman.  The lieutenant was irritable; the
+lieutenant called him a name--well, not a nice sort of name.  It referred
+to his mother.  When I was a boy it was our boys' code to fight like
+little demons should such an insult be given our mothers; and many men
+have died in my part of the world for calling other men this name.
+
+However, the lieutenant called the sailor this name.  At that moment it
+chanced the sailor had an iron lever or bar in his hands.  He promptly
+struck the lieutenant over the head with it, knocking him out of the
+rigging and overboard.
+
+And then, in the man's own words: "I saw what I had done.  I knew the
+Regulations, and I said to myself, 'It's all up with you, Jack, my boy;
+so here goes.'  An' I jumped over after him, my mind made up to drown us
+both.  An' I'd ha' done it, too, only the pinnace from the flagship was
+just comin' alongside.  Up we came to the top, me a hold of him an'
+punchin' him.  This was what settled for me.  If I hadn't ben strikin'
+him, I could have claimed that, seein' what I had done, I jumped over to
+save him."
+
+Then came the court-martial, or whatever name a sea trial goes by.  He
+recited his sentence, word for word, as though memorised and gone over in
+bitterness many times.  And here it is, for the sake of discipline and
+respect to officers not always gentlemen, the punishment of a man who was
+guilty of manhood.  To be reduced to the rank of ordinary seaman; to be
+debarred all prize-money due him; to forfeit all rights to pension; to
+resign the Victoria Cross; to be discharged from the navy with a good
+character (this being his first offence); to receive fifty lashes; and to
+serve two years in prison.
+
+"I wish I had drowned that day, I wish to God I had," he concluded, as
+the line moved up and we passed around the corner.
+
+At last the door came in sight, through which the paupers were being
+admitted in bunches.  And here I learned a surprising thing: _this being
+Wednesday, none of us would be released till Friday morning_.
+Furthermore, and oh, you tobacco users, take heed: _we would not be
+permitted to take in any tobacco_.  This we would have to surrender as we
+entered.  Sometimes, I was told, it was returned on leaving and sometimes
+it was destroyed.
+
+The old man-of-war's man gave me a lesson.  Opening his pouch, he emptied
+the tobacco (a pitiful quantity) into a piece of paper.  This, snugly and
+flatly wrapped, went down his sock inside his shoe.  Down went my piece
+of tobacco inside my sock, for forty hours without tobacco is a hardship
+all tobacco users will understand.
+
+Again and again the line moved up, and we were slowly but surely
+approaching the wicket.  At the moment we happened to be standing on an
+iron grating, and a man appearing underneath, the old sailor called down
+to him,--
+
+"How many more do they want?"
+
+"Twenty-four," came the answer.
+
+We looked ahead anxiously and counted.  Thirty-four were ahead of us.
+Disappointment and consternation dawned upon the faces about me.  It is
+not a nice thing, hungry and penniless, to face a sleepless night in the
+streets.  But we hoped against hope, till, when ten stood outside the
+wicket, the porter turned us away.
+
+"Full up," was what he said, as he banged the door.
+
+Like a flash, for all his eighty-seven years, the old sailor was speeding
+away on the desperate chance of finding shelter elsewhere.  I stood and
+debated with two other men, wise in the knowledge of casual wards, as to
+where we should go.  They decided on the Poplar Workhouse, three miles
+away, and we started off.
+
+As we rounded the corner, one of them said, "I could a' got in 'ere to-
+day.  I come by at one o'clock, an' the line was beginnin' to form
+then--pets, that's what they are.  They let 'm in, the same ones, night
+upon night."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII--THE CARTER AND THE CARPENTER
+
+
+The Carter, with his clean-cut face, chin beard, and shaved upper lip, I
+should have taken in the United States for anything from a master workman
+to a well-to-do farmer.  The Carpenter--well, I should have taken him for
+a carpenter.  He looked it, lean and wiry, with shrewd, observant eyes,
+and hands that had grown twisted to the handles of tools through forty-
+seven years' work at the trade.  The chief difficulty with these men was
+that they were old, and that their children, instead of growing up to
+take care of them, had died.  Their years had told on them, and they had
+been forced out of the whirl of industry by the younger and stronger
+competitors who had taken their places.
+
+These two men, turned away from the casual ward of Whitechapel Workhouse,
+were bound with me for Poplar Workhouse.  Not much of a show, they
+thought, but to chance it was all that remained to us.  It was Poplar, or
+the streets and night.  Both men were anxious for a bed, for they were
+"about gone," as they phrased it.  The Carter, fifty-eight years of age,
+had spent the last three nights without shelter or sleep, while the
+Carpenter, sixty-five years of age, had been out five nights.
+
+But, O dear, soft people, full of meat and blood, with white beds and
+airy rooms waiting you each night, how can I make you know what it is to
+suffer as you would suffer if you spent a weary night on London's
+streets!  Believe me, you would think a thousand centuries had come and
+gone before the east paled into dawn; you would shiver till you were
+ready to cry aloud with the pain of each aching muscle; and you would
+marvel that you could endure so much and live.  Should you rest upon a
+bench, and your tired eyes close, depend upon it the policeman would
+rouse you and gruffly order you to "move on."  You may rest upon the
+bench, and benches are few and far between; but if rest means sleep, on
+you must go, dragging your tired body through the endless streets.  Should
+you, in desperate slyness, seek some forlorn alley or dark passageway and
+lie down, the omnipresent policeman will rout you out just the same.  It
+is his business to rout you out.  It is a law of the powers that be that
+you shall be routed out.
+
+But when the dawn came, the nightmare over, you would hale you home to
+refresh yourself, and until you died you would tell the story of your
+adventure to groups of admiring friends.  It would grow into a mighty
+story.  Your little eight-hour night would become an Odyssey and you a
+Homer.
+
+Not so with these homeless ones who walked to Poplar Workhouse with me.
+And there are thirty-five thousand of them, men and women, in London Town
+this night.  Please don't remember it as you go to bed; if you are as
+soft as you ought to be you may not rest so well as usual.  But for old
+men of sixty, seventy, and eighty, ill-fed, with neither meat nor blood,
+to greet the dawn unrefreshed, and to stagger through the day in mad
+search for crusts, with relentless night rushing down upon them again,
+and to do this five nights and days--O dear, soft people, full of meat
+and blood, how can you ever understand?
+
+I walked up Mile End Road between the Carter and the Carpenter.  Mile End
+Road is a wide thoroughfare, cutting the heart of East London, and there
+were tens of thousands of people abroad on it.  I tell you this so that
+you may fully appreciate what I shall describe in the next paragraph.  As
+I say, we walked along, and when they grew bitter and cursed the land, I
+cursed with them, cursed as an American waif would curse, stranded in a
+strange and terrible land.  And, as I tried to lead them to believe, and
+succeeded in making them believe, they took me for a "seafaring man," who
+had spent his money in riotous living, lost his clothes (no unusual
+occurrence with seafaring men ashore), and was temporarily broke while
+looking for a ship.  This accounted for my ignorance of English ways in
+general and casual wards in particular, and my curiosity concerning the
+same.
+
+The Carter was hard put to keep the pace at which we walked (he told me
+that he had eaten nothing that day), but the Carpenter, lean and hungry,
+his grey and ragged overcoat flapping mournfully in the breeze, swung on
+in a long and tireless stride which reminded me strongly of the plains
+wolf or coyote.  Both kept their eyes upon the pavement as they walked
+and talked, and every now and then one or the other would stoop and pick
+something up, never missing the stride the while.  I thought it was cigar
+and cigarette stumps they were collecting, and for some time took no
+notice.  Then I did notice.
+
+_From the slimy, spittle-drenched, sidewalk, they were picking up bits of
+orange peel, apple skin, and grape stems, and, they were eating them.  The
+pits of greengage plums they cracked between their teeth for the kernels
+inside.  They picked up stray bits of bread the size of peas, apple cores
+so black and dirty one would not take them to be apple cores, and these
+things these two men took into their mouths, and chewed them, and
+swallowed them; and this, between six and seven o'clock in the evening of
+August 20, year of our Lord 1902, in the heart of the greatest,
+wealthiest, and most powerful empire the world has ever seen_.
+
+These two men talked.  They were not fools, they were merely old.  And,
+naturally, their guts a-reek with pavement offal, they talked of bloody
+revolution.  They talked as anarchists, fanatics, and madmen would talk.
+And who shall blame them?  In spite of my three good meals that day, and
+the snug bed I could occupy if I wished, and my social philosophy, and my
+evolutionary belief in the slow development and metamorphosis of
+things--in spite of all this, I say, I felt impelled to talk rot with
+them or hold my tongue.  Poor fools!  Not of their sort are revolutions
+bred.  And when they are dead and dust, which will be shortly, other
+fools will talk bloody revolution as they gather offal from the spittle-
+drenched sidewalk along Mile End Road to Poplar Workhouse.
+
+Being a foreigner, and a young man, the Carter and the Carpenter
+explained things to me and advised me.  Their advice, by the way, was
+brief, and to the point; it was to get out of the country.  "As fast as
+God'll let me," I assured them; "I'll hit only the high places, till you
+won't be able to see my trail for smoke."  They felt the force of my
+figures, rather than understood them, and they nodded their heads
+approvingly.
+
+"Actually make a man a criminal against 'is will," said the Carpenter.
+"'Ere I am, old, younger men takin' my place, my clothes gettin' shabbier
+an' shabbier, an' makin' it 'arder every day to get a job.  I go to the
+casual ward for a bed.  Must be there by two or three in the afternoon or
+I won't get in.  You saw what happened to-day.  What chance does that
+give me to look for work?  S'pose I do get into the casual ward?  Keep me
+in all day to-morrow, let me out mornin' o' next day.  What then?  The
+law sez I can't get in another casual ward that night less'n ten miles
+distant.  Have to hurry an' walk to be there in time that day.  What
+chance does that give me to look for a job?  S'pose I don't walk.  S'pose
+I look for a job?  In no time there's night come, an' no bed.  No sleep
+all night, nothin' to eat, what shape am I in the mornin' to look for
+work?  Got to make up my sleep in the park somehow" (the vision of
+Christ's Church, Spitalfield, was strong on me) "an' get something to
+eat.  An' there I am!  Old, down, an' no chance to get up."
+
+"Used to be a toll-gate 'ere," said the Carter.  "Many's the time I've
+paid my toll 'ere in my cartin' days."
+
+"I've 'ad three 'a'penny rolls in two days," the Carpenter announced,
+after a long pause in the conversation.  "Two of them I ate yesterday,
+an' the third to-day," he concluded, after another long pause.
+
+"I ain't 'ad anything to-day," said the Carter.  "An' I'm fagged out.  My
+legs is hurtin' me something fearful."
+
+"The roll you get in the 'spike' is that 'ard you can't eat it nicely
+with less'n a pint of water," said the Carpenter, for my benefit.  And,
+on asking him what the "spike" was, he answered, "The casual ward.  It's
+a cant word, you know."
+
+But what surprised me was that he should have the word "cant" in his
+vocabulary, a vocabulary that I found was no mean one before we parted.
+
+I asked them what I might expect in the way of treatment, if we succeeded
+in getting into the Poplar Workhouse, and between them I was supplied
+with much information.  Having taken a cold bath on entering, I would be
+given for supper six ounces of bread and "three parts of skilly."  "Three
+parts" means three-quarters of a pint, and "skilly" is a fluid concoction
+of three quarts of oatmeal stirred into three buckets and a half of hot
+water.
+
+"Milk and sugar, I suppose, and a silver spoon?" I queried.
+
+"No fear.  Salt's what you'll get, an' I've seen some places where you'd
+not get any spoon.  'Old 'er up an' let 'er run down, that's 'ow they do
+it."
+
+"You do get good skilly at 'Ackney," said the Carter.
+
+"Oh, wonderful skilly, that," praised the Carpenter, and each looked
+eloquently at the other.
+
+"Flour an' water at St. George's in the East," said the Carter.
+
+The Carpenter nodded.  He had tried them all.
+
+"Then what?" I demanded
+
+And I was informed that I was sent directly to bed.  "Call you at half
+after five in the mornin', an' you get up an' take a 'sluice'--if there's
+any soap.  Then breakfast, same as supper, three parts o' skilly an' a
+six-ounce loaf."
+
+"'Tisn't always six ounces," corrected the Carter.
+
+"'Tisn't, no; an' often that sour you can 'ardly eat it.  When first I
+started I couldn't eat the skilly nor the bread, but now I can eat my own
+an' another man's portion."
+
+"I could eat three other men's portions," said the Carter.  "I 'aven't
+'ad a bit this blessed day."
+
+"Then what?"
+
+"Then you've got to do your task, pick four pounds of oakum, or clean an'
+scrub, or break ten to eleven hundredweight o' stones.  I don't 'ave to
+break stones; I'm past sixty, you see.  They'll make you do it, though.
+You're young an' strong."
+
+"What I don't like," grumbled the Carter, "is to be locked up in a cell
+to pick oakum.  It's too much like prison."
+
+"But suppose, after you've had your night's sleep, you refuse to pick
+oakum, or break stones, or do any work at all?" I asked.
+
+"No fear you'll refuse the second time; they'll run you in," answered the
+Carpenter.  "Wouldn't advise you to try it on, my lad."
+
+"Then comes dinner," he went on.  "Eight ounces of bread, one and a arf
+ounces of cheese, an' cold water.  Then you finish your task an' 'ave
+supper, same as before, three parts o' skilly any six ounces o' bread.
+Then to bed, six o'clock, an' next mornin' you're turned loose, provided
+you've finished your task."
+
+We had long since left Mile End Road, and after traversing a gloomy maze
+of narrow, winding streets, we came to Poplar Workhouse.  On a low stone
+wall we spread our handkerchiefs, and each in his handkerchief put all
+his worldly possessions, with the exception of the "bit o' baccy" down
+his sock.  And then, as the last light was fading from the drab-coloured
+sky, the wind blowing cheerless and cold, we stood, with our pitiful
+little bundles in our hands, a forlorn group at the workhouse door.
+
+Three working girls came along, and one looked pityingly at me; as she
+passed I followed her with my eyes, and she still looked pityingly back
+at me.  The old men she did not notice.  Dear Christ, she pitied me,
+young and vigorous and strong, but she had no pity for the two old men
+who stood by my side!  She was a young woman, and I was a young man, and
+what vague sex promptings impelled her to pity me put her sentiment on
+the lowest plane.  Pity for old men is an altruistic feeling, and
+besides, the workhouse door is the accustomed place for old men.  So she
+showed no pity for them, only for me, who deserved it least or not at
+all.  Not in honour do grey hairs go down to the grave in London Town.
+
+On one side the door was a bell handle, on the other side a press button.
+
+"Ring the bell," said the Carter to me.
+
+And just as I ordinarily would at anybody's door, I pulled out the handle
+and rang a peal.
+
+"Oh!  Oh!" they cried in one terrified voice.  "Not so 'ard!"
+
+I let go, and they looked reproachfully at me, as though I had imperilled
+their chance for a bed and three parts of skilly.  Nobody came.  Luckily
+it was the wrong bell, and I felt better.
+
+"Press the button," I said to the Carpenter.
+
+"No, no, wait a bit," the Carter hurriedly interposed.
+
+From all of which I drew the conclusion that a poorhouse porter, who
+commonly draws a yearly salary of from seven to nine pounds, is a very
+finicky and important personage, and cannot be treated too fastidiously
+by--paupers.
+
+So we waited, ten times a decent interval, when the Carter stealthily
+advanced a timid forefinger to the button, and gave it the faintest,
+shortest possible push.  I have looked at waiting men where life or death
+was in the issue; but anxious suspense showed less plainly on their faces
+than it showed on the faces of these two men as they waited on the coming
+of the porter.
+
+He came.  He barely looked at us.  "Full up," he said and shut the door.
+
+"Another night of it," groaned the Carpenter.  In the dim light the
+Carter looked wan and grey.
+
+Indiscriminate charity is vicious, say the professional philanthropists.
+Well, I resolved to be vicious.
+
+"Come on; get your knife out and come here," I said to the Carter,
+drawing him into a dark alley.
+
+He glared at me in a frightened manner, and tried to draw back.  Possibly
+he took me for a latter-day Jack-the-Ripper, with a penchant for elderly
+male paupers.  Or he may have thought I was inveigling him into the
+commission of some desperate crime.  Anyway, he was frightened.
+
+It will be remembered, at the outset, that I sewed a pound inside my
+stoker's singlet under the armpit.  This was my emergency fund, and I was
+now called upon to use it for the first time.
+
+Not until I had gone through the acts of a contortionist, and shown the
+round coin sewed in, did I succeed in getting the Carter's help.  Even
+then his hand was trembling so that I was afraid he would cut me instead
+of the stitches, and I was forced to take the knife away and do it
+myself.  Out rolled the gold piece, a fortune in their hungry eyes; and
+away we stampeded for the nearest coffee-house.
+
+Of course I had to explain to them that I was merely an investigator, a
+social student, seeking to find out how the other half lived.  And at
+once they shut up like clams.  I was not of their kind; my speech had
+changed, the tones of my voice were different, in short, I was a
+superior, and they were superbly class conscious.
+
+"What will you have?" I asked, as the waiter came for the order.
+
+"Two slices an' a cup of tea," meekly said the Carter.
+
+"Two slices an' a cup of tea," meekly said the Carpenter.
+
+Stop a moment, and consider the situation.  Here were two men, invited by
+me into the coffee-house.  They had seen my gold piece, and they could
+understand that I was no pauper.  One had eaten a ha'penny roll that day,
+the other had eaten nothing.  And they called for "two slices an' a cup
+of tea!"  Each man had given a tu'penny order.  "Two slices," by the way,
+means two slices of bread and butter.
+
+This was the same degraded humility that had characterised their attitude
+toward the poorhouse porter.  But I wouldn't have it.  Step by step I
+increased their order--eggs, rashers of bacon, more eggs, more bacon,
+more tea, more slices and so forth--they denying wistfully all the while
+that they cared for anything more, and devouring it ravenously as fast as
+it arrived.
+
+"First cup o' tea I've 'ad in a fortnight," said the Carter.
+
+"Wonderful tea, that," said the Carpenter.
+
+They each drank two pints of it, and I assure you that it was slops.  It
+resembled tea less than lager beer resembles champagne.  Nay, it was
+"water-bewitched," and did not resemble tea at all.
+
+It was curious, after the first shock, to notice the effect the food had
+on them.  At first they were melancholy, and talked of the divers times
+they had contemplated suicide.  The Carter, not a week before, had stood
+on the bridge and looked at the water, and pondered the question.  Water,
+the Carpenter insisted with heat, was a bad route.  He, for one, he knew,
+would struggle.  A bullet was "'andier," but how under the sun was he to
+get hold of a revolver?  That was the rub.
+
+They grew more cheerful as the hot "tea" soaked in, and talked more about
+themselves.  The Carter had buried his wife and children, with the
+exception of one son, who grew to manhood and helped him in his little
+business.  Then the thing happened.  The son, a man of thirty-one, died
+of the smallpox.  No sooner was this over than the father came down with
+fever and went to the hospital for three months.  Then he was done for.
+He came out weak, debilitated, no strong young son to stand by him, his
+little business gone glimmering, and not a farthing.  The thing had
+happened, and the game was up.  No chance for an old man to start again.
+Friends all poor and unable to help.  He had tried for work when they
+were putting up the stands for the first Coronation parade.  "An' I got
+fair sick of the answer: 'No! no! no!'  It rang in my ears at night when
+I tried to sleep, always the same, 'No! no! no!'"  Only the past week he
+had answered an advertisement in Hackney, and on giving his age was told,
+"Oh, too old, too old by far."
+
+The Carpenter had been born in the army, where his father had served
+twenty-two years.  Likewise, his two brothers had gone into the army;
+one, troop sergeant-major of the Seventh Hussars, dying in India after
+the Mutiny; the other, after nine years under Roberts in the East, had
+been lost in Egypt.  The Carpenter had not gone into the army, so here he
+was, still on the planet.
+
+"But 'ere, give me your 'and," he said, ripping open his ragged shirt.
+"I'm fit for the anatomist, that's all.  I'm wastin' away, sir, actually
+wastin' away for want of food.  Feel my ribs an' you'll see."
+
+I put my hand under his shirt and felt.  The skin was stretched like
+parchment over the bones, and the sensation produced was for all the
+world like running one's hand over a washboard.
+
+"Seven years o' bliss I 'ad," he said.  "A good missus and three bonnie
+lassies.  But they all died.  Scarlet fever took the girls inside a
+fortnight."
+
+"After this, sir," said the Carter, indicating the spread, and desiring
+to turn the conversation into more cheerful channels; "after this, I
+wouldn't be able to eat a workhouse breakfast in the morning."
+
+"Nor I," agreed the Carpenter, and they fell to discussing belly delights
+and the fine dishes their respective wives had cooked in the old days.
+
+"I've gone three days and never broke my fast," said the Carter.
+
+"And I, five," his companion added, turning gloomy with the memory of it.
+"Five days once, with nothing on my stomach but a bit of orange peel, an'
+outraged nature wouldn't stand it, sir, an' I near died.  Sometimes,
+walkin' the streets at night, I've ben that desperate I've made up my
+mind to win the horse or lose the saddle.  You know what I mean, sir--to
+commit some big robbery.  But when mornin' come, there was I, too weak
+from 'unger an' cold to 'arm a mouse."
+
+As their poor vitals warmed to the food, they began to expand and wax
+boastful, and to talk politics.  I can only say that they talked politics
+as well as the average middle-class man, and a great deal better than
+some of the middle-class men I have heard.  What surprised me was the
+hold they had on the world, its geography and peoples, and on recent and
+contemporaneous history.  As I say, they were not fools, these two men.
+They were merely old, and their children had undutifully failed to grow
+up and give them a place by the fire.
+
+One last incident, as I bade them good-bye on the corner, happy with a
+couple of shillings in their pockets and the certain prospect of a bed
+for the night.  Lighting a cigarette, I was about to throw away the
+burning match when the Carter reached for it.  I proffered him the box,
+but he said, "Never mind, won't waste it, sir."  And while he lighted the
+cigarette I had given him, the Carpenter hurried with the filling of his
+pipe in order to have a go at the same match.
+
+"It's wrong to waste," said he.
+
+"Yes," I said, but I was thinking of the wash-board ribs over which I had
+run my hand.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX--THE SPIKE
+
+
+First of all, I must beg forgiveness of my body for the vileness through
+which I have dragged it, and forgiveness of my stomach for the vileness
+which I have thrust into it.  I have been to the spike, and slept in the
+spike, and eaten in the spike; also, I have run away from the spike.
+
+After my two unsuccessful attempts to penetrate the Whitechapel casual
+ward, I started early, and joined the desolate line before three o'clock
+in the afternoon.  They did not "let in" till six, but at that early hour
+I was number twenty, while the news had gone forth that only twenty-two
+were to be admitted.  By four o'clock there were thirty-four in line, the
+last ten hanging on in the slender hope of getting in by some kind of a
+miracle.  Many more came, looked at the line, and went away, wise to the
+bitter fact that the spike would be "full up."
+
+Conversation was slack at first, standing there, till the man on one side
+of me and the man on the other side of me discovered that they had been
+in the smallpox hospital at the same time, though a full house of sixteen
+hundred patients had prevented their becoming acquainted.  But they made
+up for it, discussing and comparing the more loathsome features of their
+disease in the most cold-blooded, matter-of-fact way.  I learned that the
+average mortality was one in six, that one of them had been in three
+months and the other three months and a half, and that they had been
+"rotten wi' it."  Whereat my flesh began to creep and crawl, and I asked
+them how long they had been out.  One had been out two weeks, and the
+other three weeks.  Their faces were badly pitted (though each assured
+the other that this was not so), and further, they showed me in their
+hands and under the nails the smallpox "seeds" still working out.  Nay,
+one of them worked a seed out for my edification, and pop it went, right
+out of his flesh into the air.  I tried to shrink up smaller inside my
+clothes, and I registered a fervent though silent hope that it had not
+popped on me.
+
+In both instances, I found that the smallpox was the cause of their being
+"on the doss," which means on the tramp.  Both had been working when
+smitten by the disease, and both had emerged from the hospital "broke,"
+with the gloomy task before them of hunting for work.  So far, they had
+not found any, and they had come to the spike for a "rest up" after three
+days and nights on the street.
+
+It seems that not only the man who becomes old is punished for his
+involuntary misfortune, but likewise the man who is struck by disease or
+accident.  Later on, I talked with another man--"Ginger" we called
+him--who stood at the head of the line--a sure indication that he had
+been waiting since one o'clock.  A year before, one day, while in the
+employ of a fish dealer, he was carrying a heavy box of fish which was
+too much for him.  Result: "something broke," and there was the box on
+the ground, and he on the ground beside it.
+
+At the first hospital, whither he was immediately carried, they said it
+was a rupture, reduced the swelling, gave him some vaseline to rub on it,
+kept him four hours, and told him to get along.  But he was not on the
+streets more than two or three hours when he was down on his back again.
+This time he went to another hospital and was patched up.  But the point
+is, the employer did nothing, positively nothing, for the man injured in
+his employment, and even refused him "a light job now and again," when he
+came out.  As far as Ginger is concerned, he is a broken man.  His only
+chance to earn a living was by heavy work.  He is now incapable of
+performing heavy work, and from now until he dies, the spike, the peg,
+and the streets are all he can look forward to in the way of food and
+shelter.  The thing happened--that is all.  He put his back under too
+great a load of fish, and his chance for happiness in life was crossed
+off the books.
+
+Several men in the line had been to the United States, and they were
+wishing that they had remained there, and were cursing themselves for
+their folly in ever having left.  England had become a prison to them, a
+prison from which there was no hope of escape.  It was impossible for
+them to get away.  They could neither scrape together the passage money,
+nor get a chance to work their passage.  The country was too overrun by
+poor devils on that "lay."
+
+I was on the seafaring-man-who-had-lost-his-clothes-and-money tack, and
+they all condoled with me and gave me much sound advice.  To sum it up,
+the advice was something like this: To keep out of all places like the
+spike.  There was nothing good in it for me.  To head for the coast and
+bend every effort to get away on a ship.  To go to work, if possible, and
+scrape together a pound or so, with which I might bribe some steward or
+underling to give me chance to work my passage.  They envied me my youth
+and strength, which would sooner or later get me out of the country.
+These they no longer possessed.  Age and English hardship had broken
+them, and for them the game was played and up.
+
+There was one, however, who was still young, and who, I am sure, will in
+the end make it out.  He had gone to the United States as a young fellow,
+and in fourteen years' residence the longest period he had been out of
+work was twelve hours.  He had saved his money, grown too prosperous, and
+returned to the mother-country.  Now he was standing in line at the
+spike.
+
+For the past two years, he told me, he had been working as a cook.  His
+hours had been from 7 a.m. to 10.30 p.m., and on Saturday to 12.30
+p.m.--ninety-five hours per week, for which he had received twenty
+shillings, or five dollars.
+
+"But the work and the long hours was killing me," he said, "and I had to
+chuck the job.  I had a little money saved, but I spent it living and
+looking for another place."
+
+This was his first night in the spike, and he had come in only to get
+rested.  As soon as he emerged, he intended to start for Bristol, a one-
+hundred-and-ten-mile walk, where he thought he would eventually get a
+ship for the States.
+
+But the men in the line were not all of this calibre.  Some were poor,
+wretched beasts, inarticulate and callous, but for all of that, in many
+ways very human.  I remember a carter, evidently returning home after the
+day's work, stopping his cart before us so that his young hopeful, who
+had run to meet him, could climb in.  But the cart was big, the young
+hopeful little, and he failed in his several attempts to swarm up.
+Whereupon one of the most degraded-looking men stepped out of the line
+and hoisted him in.  Now the virtue and the joy of this act lies in that
+it was service of love, not hire.  The carter was poor, and the man knew
+it; and the man was standing in the spike line, and the carter knew it;
+and the man had done the little act, and the carter had thanked him, even
+as you and I would have done and thanked.
+
+Another beautiful touch was that displayed by the "Hopper" and his "ole
+woman."  He had been in line about half-an-hour when the "ole woman" (his
+mate) came up to him.  She was fairly clad, for her class, with a weather-
+worn bonnet on her grey head and a sacking-covered bundle in her arms.  As
+she talked to him, he reached forward, caught the one stray wisp of the
+white hair that was flying wild, deftly twirled it between his fingers,
+and tucked it back properly behind her ear.  From all of which one may
+conclude many things.  He certainly liked her well enough to wish her to
+be neat and tidy.  He was proud of her, standing there in the spike line,
+and it was his desire that she should look well in the eyes of the other
+unfortunates who stood in the spike line.  But last and best, and
+underlying all these motives, it was a sturdy affection he bore her; for
+man is not prone to bother his head over neatness and tidiness in a woman
+for whom he does not care, nor is he likely to be proud of such a woman.
+
+And I found myself questioning why this man and his mate, hard workers I
+knew from their talk, should have to seek a pauper lodging.  He had
+pride, pride in his old woman and pride in himself.  When I asked him
+what he thought I, a greenhorn, might expect to earn at "hopping," he
+sized me up, and said that it all depended.  Plenty of people were too
+slow to pick hops and made a failure of it.  A man, to succeed, must use
+his head and be quick with his fingers, must be exceeding quick with his
+fingers.  Now he and his old woman could do very well at it, working the
+one bin between them and not going to sleep over it; but then, they had
+been at it for years.
+
+"I 'ad a mate as went down last year," spoke up a man.  "It was 'is fust
+time, but 'e come back wi' two poun' ten in 'is pockit, an' 'e was only
+gone a month."
+
+"There you are," said the Hopper, a wealth of admiration in his voice.
+"'E was quick.  'E was jest nat'rally born to it, 'e was."
+
+Two pound ten--twelve dollars and a half--for a month's work when one is
+"jest nat'rally born to it!"  And in addition, sleeping out without
+blankets and living the Lord knows how.  There are moments when I am
+thankful that I was not "jest nat'rally born" a genius for anything, not
+even hop-picking,
+
+In the matter of getting an outfit for "the hops," the Hopper gave me
+some sterling advice, to which same give heed, you soft and tender
+people, in case you should ever be stranded in London Town.
+
+"If you ain't got tins an' cookin' things, all as you can get'll be bread
+and cheese.  No bloomin' good that!  You must 'ave 'ot tea, an'
+wegetables, an' a bit o' meat, now an' again, if you're goin' to do work
+as is work.  Cawn't do it on cold wittles.  Tell you wot you do, lad.  Run
+around in the mornin' an' look in the dust pans.  You'll find plenty o'
+tins to cook in.  Fine tins, wonderful good some o' them.  Me an' the ole
+woman got ours that way."  (He pointed at the bundle she held, while she
+nodded proudly, beaming on me with good-nature and consciousness of
+success and prosperity.)  "This overcoat is as good as a blanket," he
+went on, advancing the skirt of it that I might feel its thickness.  "An'
+'oo knows, I may find a blanket before long."
+
+Again the old woman nodded and beamed, this time with the dead certainty
+that he _would_ find a blanket before long.
+
+"I call it a 'oliday, 'oppin'," he concluded rapturously.  "A tidy way o'
+gettin' two or three pounds together an' fixin' up for winter.  The only
+thing I don't like"--and here was the rift within the lute--"is paddin'
+the 'oof down there."
+
+It was plain the years were telling on this energetic pair, and while
+they enjoyed the quick work with the fingers, "paddin' the 'oof," which
+is walking, was beginning to bear heavily upon them.  And I looked at
+their grey hairs, and ahead into the future ten years, and wondered how
+it would be with them.
+
+I noticed another man and his old woman join the line, both of them past
+fifty.  The woman, because she was a woman, was admitted into the spike;
+but he was too late, and, separated from his mate, was turned away to
+tramp the streets all night.
+
+The street on which we stood, from wall to wall, was barely twenty feet
+wide.  The sidewalks were three feet wide.  It was a residence street.  At
+least workmen and their families existed in some sort of fashion in the
+houses across from us.  And each day and every day, from one in the
+afternoon till six, our ragged spike line is the principal feature of the
+view commanded by their front doors and windows.  One workman sat in his
+door directly opposite us, taking his rest and a breath of air after the
+toil of the day.  His wife came to chat with him.  The doorway was too
+small for two, so she stood up.  Their babes sprawled before them.  And
+here was the spike line, less than a score of feet away--neither privacy
+for the workman, nor privacy for the pauper.  About our feet played the
+children of the neighbourhood.  To them our presence was nothing unusual.
+We were not an intrusion.  We were as natural and ordinary as the brick
+walls and stone curbs of their environment.  They had been born to the
+sight of the spike line, and all their brief days they had seen it.
+
+At six o'clock the line moved up, and we were admitted in groups of
+three.  Name, age, occupation, place of birth, condition of destitution,
+and the previous night's "doss," were taken with lightning-like rapidity
+by the superintendent; and as I turned I was startled by a man's
+thrusting into my hand something that felt like a brick, and shouting
+into my ear, "any knives, matches, or tobacco?"  "No, sir," I lied, as
+lied every man who entered.  As I passed downstairs to the cellar, I
+looked at the brick in my hand, and saw that by doing violence to the
+language it might be called "bread."  By its weight and hardness it
+certainly must have been unleavened.
+
+The light was very dim down in the cellar, and before I knew it some
+other man had thrust a pannikin into my other hand.  Then I stumbled on
+to a still darker room, where were benches and tables and men.  The place
+smelled vilely, and the sombre gloom, and the mumble of voices from out
+of the obscurity, made it seem more like some anteroom to the infernal
+regions.
+
+Most of the men were suffering from tired feet, and they prefaced the
+meal by removing their shoes and unbinding the filthy rags with which
+their feet were wrapped.  This added to the general noisomeness, while it
+took away from my appetite.
+
+In fact, I found that I had made a mistake.  I had eaten a hearty dinner
+five hours before, and to have done justice to the fare before me I
+should have fasted for a couple of days.  The pannikin contained skilly,
+three-quarters of a pint, a mixture of Indian corn and hot water.  The
+men were dipping their bread into heaps of salt scattered over the dirty
+tables.  I attempted the same, but the bread seemed to stick in my mouth,
+and I remembered the words of the Carpenter, "You need a pint of water to
+eat the bread nicely."
+
+I went over into a dark corner where I had observed other men going and
+found the water.  Then I returned and attacked the skilly.  It was coarse
+of texture, unseasoned, gross, and bitter.  This bitterness which
+lingered persistently in the mouth after the skilly had passed on, I
+found especially repulsive.  I struggled manfully, but was mastered by my
+qualms, and half-a-dozen mouthfuls of skilly and bread was the measure of
+my success.  The man beside me ate his own share, and mine to boot,
+scraped the pannikins, and looked hungrily for more.
+
+"I met a 'towny,' and he stood me too good a dinner," I explained.
+
+"An' I 'aven't 'ad a bite since yesterday mornin'," he replied.
+
+"How about tobacco?" I asked.  "Will the bloke bother with a fellow now?"
+
+"Oh no," he answered me.  "No bloomin' fear.  This is the easiest spike
+goin'.  Y'oughto see some of them.  Search you to the skin."
+
+The pannikins scraped clean, conversation began to spring up.  "This
+super'tendent 'ere is always writin' to the papers 'bout us mugs," said
+the man on the other side of me.
+
+"What does he say?" I asked.
+
+"Oh, 'e sez we're no good, a lot o' blackguards an' scoundrels as won't
+work.  Tells all the ole tricks I've bin 'earin' for twenty years an'
+w'ich I never seen a mug ever do.  Las' thing of 'is I see, 'e was
+tellin' 'ow a mug gets out o' the spike, wi' a crust in 'is pockit.  An'
+w'en 'e sees a nice ole gentleman comin' along the street 'e chucks the
+crust into the drain, an' borrows the old gent's stick to poke it out.
+An' then the ole gent gi'es 'im a tanner."
+
+A roar of applause greeted the time-honoured yarn, and from somewhere
+over in the deeper darkness came another voice, orating angrily:
+
+"Talk o' the country bein' good for tommy [food]; I'd like to see it.  I
+jest came up from Dover, an' blessed little tommy I got.  They won't gi'
+ye a drink o' water, they won't, much less tommy."
+
+"There's mugs never go out of Kent," spoke a second voice, "they live
+bloomin' fat all along."
+
+"I come through Kent," went on the first voice, still more angrily, "an'
+Gawd blimey if I see any tommy.  An' I always notices as the blokes as
+talks about 'ow much they can get, w'en they're in the spike can eat my
+share o' skilly as well as their bleedin' own."
+
+"There's chaps in London," said a man across the table from me, "that get
+all the tommy they want, an' they never think o' goin' to the country.
+Stay in London the year 'round.  Nor do they think of lookin' for a kip
+[place to sleep], till nine or ten o'clock at night."
+
+A general chorus verified this statement
+
+"But they're bloomin' clever, them chaps," said an admiring voice.
+
+"Course they are," said another voice.  "But it's not the likes of me an'
+you can do it.  You got to be born to it, I say.  Them chaps 'ave ben
+openin' cabs an' sellin' papers since the day they was born, an' their
+fathers an' mothers before 'em.  It's all in the trainin', I say, an' the
+likes of me an' you 'ud starve at it."
+
+This also was verified by the general chorus, and likewise the statement
+that there were "mugs as lives the twelvemonth 'round in the spike an'
+never get a blessed bit o' tommy other than spike skilly an' bread."
+
+"I once got arf a crown in the Stratford spike," said a new voice.
+Silence fell on the instant, and all listened to the wonderful tale.
+"There was three of us breakin' stones.  Winter-time, an' the cold was
+cruel.  T'other two said they'd be blessed if they do it, an' they
+didn't; but I kept wearin' into mine to warm up, you know.  An' then the
+guardians come, an' t'other chaps got run in for fourteen days, an' the
+guardians, w'en they see wot I'd been doin', gives me a tanner each, five
+o' them, an' turns me up."
+
+The majority of these men, nay, all of them, I found, do not like the
+spike, and only come to it when driven in.  After the "rest up" they are
+good for two or three days and nights on the streets, when they are
+driven in again for another rest.  Of course, this continuous hardship
+quickly breaks their constitutions, and they realise it, though only in a
+vague way; while it is so much the common run of things that they do not
+worry about it.
+
+"On the doss," they call vagabondage here, which corresponds to "on the
+road" in the United States.  The agreement is that kipping, or dossing,
+or sleeping, is the hardest problem they have to face, harder even than
+that of food.  The inclement weather and the harsh laws are mainly
+responsible for this, while the men themselves ascribe their homelessness
+to foreign immigration, especially of Polish and Russian Jews, who take
+their places at lower wages and establish the sweating system.
+
+By seven o'clock we were called away to bathe and go to bed.  We stripped
+our clothes, wrapping them up in our coats and buckling our belts about
+them, and deposited them in a heaped rack and on the floor--a beautiful
+scheme for the spread of vermin.  Then, two by two, we entered the
+bathroom.  There were two ordinary tubs, and this I know: the two men
+preceding had washed in that water, we washed in the same water, and it
+was not changed for the two men that followed us.  This I know; but I am
+also certain that the twenty-two of us washed in the same water.
+
+I did no more than make a show of splashing some of this dubious liquid
+at myself, while I hastily brushed it off with a towel wet from the
+bodies of other men.  My equanimity was not restored by seeing the back
+of one poor wretch a mass of blood from attacks of vermin and retaliatory
+scratching.
+
+A shirt was handed me--which I could not help but wonder how many other
+men had worn; and with a couple of blankets under my arm I trudged off to
+the sleeping apartment.  This was a long, narrow room, traversed by two
+low iron rails.  Between these rails were stretched, not hammocks, but
+pieces of canvas, six feet long and less than two feet wide.  These were
+the beds, and they were six inches apart and about eight inches above the
+floor.  The chief difficulty was that the head was somewhat higher than
+the feet, which caused the body constantly to slip down.  Being slung to
+the same rails, when one man moved, no matter how slightly, the rest were
+set rocking; and whenever I dozed somebody was sure to struggle back to
+the position from which he had slipped, and arouse me again.
+
+Many hours passed before I won to sleep.  It was only seven in the
+evening, and the voices of children, in shrill outcry, playing in the
+street, continued till nearly midnight.  The smell was frightful and
+sickening, while my imagination broke loose, and my skin crept and
+crawled till I was nearly frantic.  Grunting, groaning, and snoring arose
+like the sounds emitted by some sea monster, and several times, afflicted
+by nightmare, one or another, by his shrieks and yells, aroused the lot
+of us.  Toward morning I was awakened by a rat or some similar animal on
+my breast.  In the quick transition from sleep to waking, before I was
+completely myself, I raised a shout to wake the dead.  At any rate, I
+woke the living, and they cursed me roundly for my lack of manners.
+
+But morning came, with a six o'clock breakfast of bread and skilly, which
+I gave away, and we were told off to our various tasks.  Some were set to
+scrubbing and cleaning, others to picking oakum, and eight of us were
+convoyed across the street to the Whitechapel Infirmary where we were set
+at scavenger work.  This was the method by which we paid for our skilly
+and canvas, and I, for one, know that I paid in full many times over.
+
+Though we had most revolting tasks to perform, our allotment was
+considered the best and the other men deemed themselves lucky in being
+chosen to perform it.
+
+"Don't touch it, mate, the nurse sez it's deadly," warned my working
+partner, as I held open a sack into which he was emptying a garbage can.
+
+It came from the sick wards, and I told him that I purposed neither to
+touch it, nor to allow it to touch me.  Nevertheless, I had to carry the
+sack, and other sacks, down five flights of stairs and empty them in a
+receptacle where the corruption was speedily sprinkled with strong
+disinfectant.
+
+Perhaps there is a wise mercy in all this.  These men of the spike, the
+peg, and the street, are encumbrances.  They are of no good or use to any
+one, nor to themselves.  They clutter the earth with their presence, and
+are better out of the way.  Broken by hardship, ill fed, and worse
+nourished, they are always the first to be struck down by disease, as
+they are likewise the quickest to die.
+
+They feel, themselves, that the forces of society tend to hurl them out
+of existence.  We were sprinkling disinfectant by the mortuary, when the
+dead waggon drove up and five bodies were packed into it.  The
+conversation turned to the "white potion" and "black jack," and I found
+they were all agreed that the poor person, man or woman, who in the
+Infirmary gave too much trouble or was in a bad way, was "polished off."
+That is to say, the incurables and the obstreperous were given a dose of
+"black jack" or the "white potion," and sent over the divide.  It does
+not matter in the least whether this be actually so or not.  The point
+is, they have the feeling that it is so, and they have created the
+language with which to express that feeling--"black jack" "white potion,"
+"polishing off."
+
+At eight o'clock we went down into a cellar under the infirmary, where
+tea was brought to us, and the hospital scraps.  These were heaped high
+on a huge platter in an indescribable mess--pieces of bread, chunks of
+grease and fat pork, the burnt skin from the outside of roasted joints,
+bones, in short, all the leavings from the fingers and mouths of the sick
+ones suffering from all manner of diseases.  Into this mess the men
+plunged their hands, digging, pawing, turning over, examining, rejecting,
+and scrambling for.  It wasn't pretty.  Pigs couldn't have done worse.
+But the poor devils were hungry, and they ate ravenously of the swill,
+and when they could eat no more they bundled what was left into their
+handkerchiefs and thrust it inside their shirts.
+
+"Once, w'en I was 'ere before, wot did I find out there but a 'ole lot of
+pork-ribs," said Ginger to me.  By "out there" he meant the place where
+the corruption was dumped and sprinkled with strong disinfectant.  "They
+was a prime lot, no end o' meat on 'em, an' I 'ad 'em into my arms an'
+was out the gate an' down the street, a-lookin' for some 'un to gi' 'em
+to.  Couldn't see a soul, an' I was runnin' 'round clean crazy, the bloke
+runnin' after me an' thinkin' I was 'slingin' my 'ook' [running away].
+But jest before 'e got me, I got a ole woman an' poked 'em into 'er
+apron."
+
+O Charity, O Philanthropy, descend to the spike and take a lesson from
+Ginger.  At the bottom of the Abyss he performed as purely an altruistic
+act as was ever performed outside the Abyss.  It was fine of Ginger, and
+if the old woman caught some contagion from the "no end o' meat" on the
+pork-ribs, it was still fine, though not so fine.  But the most salient
+thing in this incident, it seems to me, is poor Ginger, "clean crazy" at
+sight of so much food going to waste.
+
+It is the rule of the casual ward that a man who enters must stay two
+nights and a day; but I had seen sufficient for my purpose, had paid for
+my skilly and canvas, and was preparing to run for it.
+
+"Come on, let's sling it," I said to one of my mates, pointing toward the
+open gate through which the dead waggon had come.
+
+"An' get fourteen days?"
+
+"No; get away."
+
+"Aw, I come 'ere for a rest," he said complacently.  "An' another night's
+kip won't 'urt me none."
+
+They were all of this opinion, so I was forced to "sling it" alone.
+
+"You cawn't ever come back 'ere again for a doss," they warned me.
+
+"No fear," said I, with an enthusiasm they could not comprehend; and,
+dodging out the gate, I sped down the street.
+
+Straight to my room I hurried, changed my clothes, and less than an hour
+from my escape, in a Turkish bath, I was sweating out whatever germs and
+other things had penetrated my epidermis, and wishing that I could stand
+a temperature of three hundred and twenty rather than two hundred and
+twenty.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X--CARRYING THE BANNER
+
+
+"To carry the banner" means to walk the streets all night; and I, with
+the figurative emblem hoisted, went out to see what I could see.  Men and
+women walk the streets at night all over this great city, but I selected
+the West End, making Leicester Square my base, and scouting about from
+the Thames Embankment to Hyde Park.
+
+The rain was falling heavily when the theatres let out, and the brilliant
+throng which poured from the places of amusement was hard put to find
+cabs.  The streets were so many wild rivers of cabs, most of which were
+engaged, however; and here I saw the desperate attempts of ragged men and
+boys to get a shelter from the night by procuring cabs for the cabless
+ladies and gentlemen.  I use the word "desperate" advisedly, for these
+wretched, homeless ones were gambling a soaking against a bed; and most
+of them, I took notice, got the soaking and missed the bed.  Now, to go
+through a stormy night with wet clothes, and, in addition, to be ill
+nourished and not to have tasted meat for a week or a month, is about as
+severe a hardship as a man can undergo.  Well fed and well clad, I have
+travelled all day with the spirit thermometer down to seventy-four
+degrees below zero--one hundred and six degrees of frost {1}; and though
+I suffered, it was a mere nothing compared with carrying the banner for a
+night, ill fed, ill clad, and soaking wet.
+
+The streets grew very quiet and lonely after the theatre crowd had gone
+home.  Only were to be seen the ubiquitous policemen, flashing their dark
+lanterns into doorways and alleys, and men and women and boys taking
+shelter in the lee of buildings from the wind and rain.  Piccadilly,
+however, was not quite so deserted.  Its pavements were brightened by
+well-dressed women without escort, and there was more life and action
+there than elsewhere, due to the process of finding escort.  But by three
+o'clock the last of them had vanished, and it was then indeed lonely.
+
+At half-past one the steady downpour ceased, and only showers fell
+thereafter.  The homeless folk came away from the protection of the
+buildings, and slouched up and down and everywhere, in order to rush up
+the circulation and keep warm.
+
+One old woman, between fifty and sixty, a sheer wreck, I had noticed
+earlier in the night standing in Piccadilly, not far from Leicester
+Square.  She seemed to have neither the sense nor the strength to get out
+of the rain or keep walking, but stood stupidly, whenever she got the
+chance, meditating on past days, I imagine, when life was young and blood
+was warm.  But she did not get the chance often.  She was moved on by
+every policeman, and it required an average of six moves to send her
+doddering off one man's beat and on to another's.  By three o'clock, she
+had progressed as far as St. James Street, and as the clocks were
+striking four I saw her sleeping soundly against the iron railings of
+Green Park.  A brisk shower was falling at the time, and she must have
+been drenched to the skin.
+
+Now, said I, at one o'clock, to myself; consider that you are a poor
+young man, penniless, in London Town, and that to-morrow you must look
+for work.  It is necessary, therefore, that you get some sleep in order
+that you may have strength to look for work and to do work in case you
+find it.
+
+So I sat down on the stone steps of a building.  Five minutes later a
+policeman was looking at me.  My eyes were wide open, so he only grunted
+and passed on.  Ten minutes later my head was on my knees, I was dozing,
+and the same policeman was saying gruffly, "'Ere, you, get outa that!"
+
+I got.  And, like the old woman, I continued to get; for every time I
+dozed, a policeman was there to rout me along again.  Not long after,
+when I had given this up, I was walking with a young Londoner (who had
+been out to the colonies and wished he were out to them again), when I
+noticed an open passage leading under a building and disappearing in
+darkness.  A low iron gate barred the entrance.
+
+"Come on," I said.  "Let's climb over and get a good sleep."
+
+"Wot?" he answered, recoiling from me.  "An' get run in fer three months!
+Blimey if I do!"
+
+Later on I was passing Hyde Park with a young boy of fourteen or fifteen,
+a most wretched-looking youth, gaunt and hollow-eyed and sick.
+
+"Let's go over the fence," I proposed, "and crawl into the shrubbery for
+a sleep.  The bobbies couldn't find us there."
+
+"No fear," he answered.  "There's the park guardians, and they'd run you
+in for six months."
+
+Times have changed, alas!  When I was a youngster I used to read of
+homeless boys sleeping in doorways.  Already the thing has become a
+tradition.  As a stock situation it will doubtless linger in literature
+for a century to come, but as a cold fact it has ceased to be.  Here are
+the doorways, and here are the boys, but happy conjunctions are no longer
+effected.  The doorways remain empty, and the boys keep awake and carry
+the banner.
+
+"I was down under the arches," grumbled another young fellow.  By
+"arches" he meant the shore arches where begin the bridges that span the
+Thames.  "I was down under the arches wen it was ryning its 'ardest, an'
+a bobby comes in an' chyses me out.  But I come back, an' 'e come too.
+''Ere,' sez 'e, 'wot you doin' 'ere?'  An' out I goes, but I sez, 'Think
+I want ter pinch [steal] the bleedin' bridge?'"
+
+Among those who carry the banner, Green Park has the reputation of
+opening its gates earlier than the other parks, and at quarter-past four
+in the morning, I, and many more, entered Green Park.  It was raining
+again, but they were worn out with the night's walking, and they were
+down on the benches and asleep at once.  Many of the men stretched out
+full length on the dripping wet grass, and, with the rain falling
+steadily upon them, were sleeping the sleep of exhaustion.
+
+And now I wish to criticise the powers that be.  They _are_ the powers,
+therefore they may decree whatever they please; so I make bold only to
+criticise the ridiculousness of their decrees.  All night long they make
+the homeless ones walk up and down.  They drive them out of doors and
+passages, and lock them out of the parks.  The evident intention of all
+this is to deprive them of sleep.  Well and good, the powers have the
+power to deprive them of sleep, or of anything else for that matter; but
+why under the sun do they open the gates of the parks at five o'clock in
+the morning and let the homeless ones go inside and sleep?  If it is
+their intention to deprive them of sleep, why do they let them sleep
+after five in the morning?  And if it is not their intention to deprive
+them of sleep, why don't they let them sleep earlier in the night?
+
+In this connection, I will say that I came by Green Park that same day,
+at one in the afternoon, and that I counted scores of the ragged wretches
+asleep in the grass.  It was Sunday afternoon, the sun was fitfully
+appearing, and the well-dressed West Enders, with their wives and
+progeny, were out by thousands, taking the air.  It was not a pleasant
+sight for them, those horrible, unkempt, sleeping vagabonds; while the
+vagabonds themselves, I know, would rather have done their sleeping the
+night before.
+
+And so, dear soft people, should you ever visit London Town, and see
+these men asleep on the benches and in the grass, please do not think
+they are lazy creatures, preferring sleep to work.  Know that the powers
+that be have kept them walking all the night long, and that in the day
+they have nowhere else to sleep.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI--THE PEG
+
+
+But, after carrying the banner all night, I did not sleep in Green Park
+when morning dawned.  I was wet to the skin, it is true, and I had had no
+sleep for twenty-four hours; but, still adventuring as a penniless man
+looking for work, I had to look about me, first for a breakfast, and next
+for the work.
+
+During the night I had heard of a place over on the Surrey side of the
+Thames, where the Salvation Army every Sunday morning gave away a
+breakfast to the unwashed.  (And, by the way, the men who carry the
+banner are unwashed in the morning, and unless it is raining they do not
+have much show for a wash, either.)  This, thought I, is the very
+thing--breakfast in the morning, and then the whole day in which to look
+for work.
+
+It was a weary walk.  Down St. James Street I dragged my tired legs,
+along Pall Mall, past Trafalgar Square, to the Strand.  I crossed the
+Waterloo Bridge to the Surrey side, cut across to Blackfriars Road,
+coming out near the Surrey Theatre, and arrived at the Salvation Army
+barracks before seven o'clock.  This was "the peg."  And by "the peg," in
+the argot, is meant the place where a free meal may be obtained.
+
+Here was a motley crowd of woebegone wretches who had spent the night in
+the rain.  Such prodigious misery! and so much of it!  Old men, young
+men, all manner of men, and boys to boot, and all manner of boys.  Some
+were drowsing standing up; half a score of them were stretched out on the
+stone steps in most painful postures, all of them sound asleep, the skin
+of their bodies showing red through the holes, and rents in their rags.
+And up and down the street and across the street for a block either way,
+each doorstep had from two to three occupants, all asleep, their heads
+bent forward on their knees.  And, it must be remembered, these are not
+hard times in England.  Things are going on very much as they ordinarily
+do, and times are neither hard nor easy.
+
+And then came the policeman.  "Get outa that, you bloomin' swine!  Eigh!
+eigh!  Get out now!"  And like swine he drove them from the doorways and
+scattered them to the four winds of Surrey.  But when he encountered the
+crowd asleep on the steps he was astounded.  "Shocking!" he exclaimed.
+"Shocking!  And of a Sunday morning!  A pretty sight!  Eigh! eigh!  Get
+outa that, you bleeding nuisances!"
+
+Of course it was a shocking sight, I was shocked myself.  And I should
+not care to have my own daughter pollute her eyes with such a sight, or
+come within half a mile of it; but--and there we were, and there you are,
+and "but" is all that can be said.
+
+The policeman passed on, and back we clustered, like flies around a honey
+jar.  For was there not that wonderful thing, a breakfast, awaiting us?
+We could not have clustered more persistently and desperately had they
+been giving away million-dollar bank-notes.  Some were already off to
+sleep, when back came the policeman and away we scattered only to return
+again as soon as the coast was clear.
+
+At half-past seven a little door opened, and a Salvation Army soldier
+stuck out his head.  "Ayn't no sense blockin' the wy up that wy," he
+said.  "Those as 'as tickets cawn come hin now, an' those as 'asn't
+cawn't come hin till nine."
+
+Oh, that breakfast!  Nine o'clock!  An hour and a half longer!  The men
+who held tickets were greatly envied.  They were permitted to go inside,
+have a wash, and sit down and rest until breakfast, while we waited for
+the same breakfast on the street.  The tickets had been distributed the
+previous night on the streets and along the Embankment, and the
+possession of them was not a matter of merit, but of chance.
+
+At eight-thirty, more men with tickets were admitted, and by nine the
+little gate was opened to us.  We crushed through somehow, and found
+ourselves packed in a courtyard like sardines.  On more occasions than
+one, as a Yankee tramp in Yankeeland, I have had to work for my
+breakfast; but for no breakfast did I ever work so hard as for this one.
+For over two hours I had waited outside, and for over another hour I
+waited in this packed courtyard.  I had had nothing to eat all night, and
+I was weak and faint, while the smell of the soiled clothes and unwashed
+bodies, steaming from pent animal heat, and blocked solidly about me,
+nearly turned my stomach.  So tightly were we packed, that a number of
+the men took advantage of the opportunity and went soundly asleep
+standing up.
+
+Now, about the Salvation Army in general I know nothing, and whatever
+criticism I shall make here is of that particular portion of the
+Salvation Army which does business on Blackfriars Road near the Surrey
+Theatre.  In the first place, this forcing of men who have been up all
+night to stand on their feet for hours longer, is as cruel as it is
+needless.  We were weak, famished, and exhausted from our night's
+hardship and lack of sleep, and yet there we stood, and stood, and stood,
+without rhyme or reason.
+
+Sailors were very plentiful in this crowd.  It seemed to me that one man
+in four was looking for a ship, and I found at least a dozen of them to
+be American sailors.  In accounting for their being "on the beach," I
+received the same story from each and all, and from my knowledge of sea
+affairs this story rang true.  English ships sign their sailors for the
+voyage, which means the round trip, sometimes lasting as long as three
+years; and they cannot sign off and receive their discharges until they
+reach the home port, which is England.  Their wages are low, their food
+is bad, and their treatment worse.  Very often they are really forced by
+their captains to desert in the New World or the colonies, leaving a
+handsome sum of wages behind them--a distinct gain, either to the captain
+or the owners, or to both.  But whether for this reason alone or not, it
+is a fact that large numbers of them desert.  Then, for the home voyage,
+the ship engages whatever sailors it can find on the beach.  These men
+are engaged at the somewhat higher wages that obtain in other portions of
+the world, under the agreement that they shall sign off on reaching
+England.  The reason for this is obvious; for it would be poor business
+policy to sign them for any longer time, since seamen's wages are low in
+England, and England is always crowded with sailormen on the beach.  So
+this fully accounted for the American seamen at the Salvation Army
+barracks.  To get off the beach in other outlandish places they had come
+to England, and gone on the beach in the most outlandish place of all.
+
+There were fully a score of Americans in the crowd, the non-sailors being
+"tramps royal," the men whose "mate is the wind that tramps the world."
+They were all cheerful, facing things with the pluck which is their chief
+characteristic and which seems never to desert them, withal they were
+cursing the country with lurid metaphors quite refreshing after a month
+of unimaginative, monotonous Cockney swearing.  The Cockney has one oath,
+and one oath only, the most indecent in the language, which he uses on
+any and every occasion.  Far different is the luminous and varied Western
+swearing, which runs to blasphemy rather than indecency.  And after all,
+since men will swear, I think I prefer blasphemy to indecency; there is
+an audacity about it, an adventurousness and defiance that is better than
+sheer filthiness.
+
+There was one American tramp royal whom I found particularly enjoyable.  I
+first noticed him on the street, asleep in a doorway, his head on his
+knees, but a hat on his head that one does not meet this side of the
+Western Ocean.  When the policeman routed him out, he got up slowly and
+deliberately, looked at the policeman, yawned and stretched himself,
+looked at the policeman again as much as to say he didn't know whether he
+would or wouldn't, and then sauntered leisurely down the sidewalk.  At
+the outset I was sure of the hat, but this made me sure of the wearer of
+the hat.
+
+In the jam inside I found myself alongside of him, and we had quite a
+chat.  He had been through Spain, Italy, Switzerland, and France, and had
+accomplished the practically impossible feat of beating his way three
+hundred miles on a French railway without being caught at the finish.
+Where was I hanging out? he asked.  And how did I manage for
+"kipping"?--which means sleeping.  Did I know the rounds yet?  He was
+getting on, though the country was "horstyl" and the cities were "bum."
+Fierce, wasn't it?  Couldn't "batter" (beg) anywhere without being
+"pinched."  But he wasn't going to quit it.  Buffalo Bill's Show was
+coming over soon, and a man who could drive eight horses was sure of a
+job any time.  These mugs over here didn't know beans about driving
+anything more than a span.  What was the matter with me hanging on and
+waiting for Buffalo Bill?  He was sure I could ring in somehow.
+
+And so, after all, blood is thicker than water.  We were
+fellow-countrymen and strangers in a strange land.  I had warmed to his
+battered old hat at sight of it, and he was as solicitous for my welfare
+as if we were blood brothers.  We swapped all manner of useful
+information concerning the country and the ways of its people, methods by
+which to obtain food and shelter and what not, and we parted genuinely
+sorry at having to say good-bye.
+
+One thing particularly conspicuous in this crowd was the shortness of
+stature.  I, who am but of medium height, looked over the heads of nine
+out of ten.  The natives were all short, as were the foreign sailors.
+There were only five or six in the crowd who could be called fairly tall,
+and they were Scandinavians and Americans.  The tallest man there,
+however, was an exception.  He was an Englishman, though not a Londoner.
+"Candidate for the Life Guards," I remarked to him.  "You've hit it,
+mate," was his reply; "I've served my bit in that same, and the way
+things are I'll be back at it before long."
+
+For an hour we stood quietly in this packed courtyard.  Then the men
+began to grow restless.  There was pushing and shoving forward, and a
+mild hubbub of voices.  Nothing rough, however, nor violent; merely the
+restlessness of weary and hungry men.  At this juncture forth came the
+adjutant.  I did not like him.  His eyes were not good.  There was
+nothing of the lowly Galilean about him, but a great deal of the
+centurion who said: "For I am a man in authority, having soldiers under
+me; and I say to this man, Go, and he goeth; and to another, Come, and he
+cometh; and to my servant, Do this, and he doeth it."
+
+Well, he looked at us in just that way, and those nearest to him quailed.
+Then he lifted his voice.
+
+"Stop this 'ere, now, or I'll turn you the other wy an' march you out,
+an' you'll get no breakfast."
+
+I cannot convey by printed speech the insufferable way in which he said
+this.  He seemed to me to revel in that he was a man in authority, able
+to say to half a thousand ragged wretches, "you may eat or go hungry, as
+I elect."
+
+To deny us our breakfast after standing for hours!  It was an awful
+threat, and the pitiful, abject silence which instantly fell attested its
+awfulness.  And it was a cowardly threat.  We could not strike back, for
+we were starving; and it is the way of the world that when one man feeds
+another he is that man's master.  But the centurion--I mean the
+adjutant--was not satisfied.  In the dead silence he raised his voice
+again, and repeated the threat, and amplified it.
+
+At last we were permitted to enter the feasting hall, where we found the
+"ticket men" washed but unfed.  All told, there must have been nearly
+seven hundred of us who sat down--not to meat or bread, but to speech,
+song, and prayer.  From all of which I am convinced that Tantalus suffers
+in many guises this side of the infernal regions.  The adjutant made the
+prayer, but I did not take note of it, being too engrossed with the
+massed picture of misery before me.  But the speech ran something like
+this: "You will feast in Paradise.  No matter how you starve and suffer
+here, you will feast in Paradise, that is, if you will follow the
+directions."  And so forth and so forth.  A clever bit of propaganda, I
+took it, but rendered of no avail for two reasons.  First, the men who
+received it were unimaginative and materialistic, unaware of the
+existence of any Unseen, and too inured to hell on earth to be frightened
+by hell to come.  And second, weary and exhausted from the night's
+sleeplessness and hardship, suffering from the long wait upon their feet,
+and faint from hunger, they were yearning, not for salvation, but for
+grub.  The "soul-snatchers" (as these men call all religious
+propagandists), should study the physiological basis of psychology a
+little, if they wish to make their efforts more effective.
+
+All in good time, about eleven o'clock, breakfast arrived.  It arrived,
+not on plates, but in paper parcels.  I did not have all I wanted, and I
+am sure that no man there had all he wanted, or half of what he wanted or
+needed.  I gave part of my bread to the tramp royal who was waiting for
+Buffalo Bill, and he was as ravenous at the end as he was in the
+beginning.  This is the breakfast: two slices of bread, one small piece
+of bread with raisins in it and called "cake," a wafer of cheese, and a
+mug of "water bewitched."  Numbers of the men had been waiting since five
+o'clock for it, while all of us had waited at least four hours; and in
+addition, we had been herded like swine, packed like sardines, and
+treated like curs, and been preached at, and sung to, and prayed for.  Nor
+was that all.
+
+No sooner was breakfast over (and it was over almost as quickly as it
+takes to tell), than the tired heads began to nod and droop, and in five
+minutes half of us were sound asleep.  There were no signs of our being
+dismissed, while there were unmistakable signs of preparation for a
+meeting.  I looked at a small clock hanging on the wall.  It indicated
+twenty-five minutes to twelve.  Heigh-ho, thought I, time is flying, and
+I have yet to look for work.
+
+"I want to go," I said to a couple of waking men near me.
+
+"Got ter sty fer the service," was the answer.
+
+"Do you want to stay?" I asked.
+
+They shook their heads.
+
+"Then let us go and tell them we want to get out," I continued.  "Come
+on."
+
+But the poor creatures were aghast.  So I left them to their fate, and
+went up to the nearest Salvation Army man.
+
+"I want to go," I said.  "I came here for breakfast in order that I might
+be in shape to look for work.  I didn't think it would take so long to
+get breakfast.  I think I have a chance for work in Stepney, and the
+sooner I start, the better chance I'll have of getting it."
+
+He was really a good fellow, though he was startled by my request.  "Wy,"
+he said, "we're goin' to 'old services, and you'd better sty."
+
+"But that will spoil my chances for work," I urged.  "And work is the
+most important thing for me just now."
+
+As he was only a private, he referred me to the adjutant, and to the
+adjutant I repeated my reasons for wishing to go, and politely requested
+that he let me go.
+
+"But it cawn't be done," he said, waxing virtuously indignant at such
+ingratitude.  "The idea!" he snorted.  "The idea!"
+
+"Do you mean to say that I can't get out of here?" I demanded.  "That you
+will keep me here against my will?"
+
+"Yes," he snorted.
+
+I do not know what might have happened, for I was waxing indignant
+myself; but the "congregation" had "piped" the situation, and he drew me
+over to a corner of the room, and then into another room.  Here he again
+demanded my reasons for wishing to go.
+
+"I want to go," I said, "because I wish to look for work over in Stepney,
+and every hour lessens my chance of finding work.  It is now twenty-five
+minutes to twelve.  I did not think when I came in that it would take so
+long to get a breakfast."
+
+"You 'ave business, eh?" he sneered.  "A man of business you are, eh?
+Then wot did you come 'ere for?"
+
+"I was out all night, and I needed a breakfast in order to strengthen me
+to find work.  That is why I came here."
+
+"A nice thing to do," he went on in the same sneering manner.  "A man
+with business shouldn't come 'ere.  You've tyken some poor man's
+breakfast 'ere this morning, that's wot you've done."
+
+Which was a lie, for every mother's son of us had come in.
+
+Now I submit, was this Christian-like, or even honest?--after I had
+plainly stated that I was homeless and hungry, and that I wished to look
+for work, for him to call my looking for work "business," to call me
+therefore a business man, and to draw the corollary that a man of
+business, and well off, did not require a charity breakfast, and that by
+taking a charity breakfast I had robbed some hungry waif who was not a
+man of business.
+
+I kept my temper, but I went over the facts again, and clearly and
+concisely demonstrated to him how unjust he was and how he had perverted
+the facts.  As I manifested no signs of backing down (and I am sure my
+eyes were beginning to snap), he led me to the rear of the building
+where, in an open court, stood a tent.  In the same sneering tone he
+informed a couple of privates standing there that "'ere is a fellow that
+'as business an' 'e wants to go before services."
+
+They were duly shocked, of course, and they looked unutterable horror
+while he went into the tent and brought out the major.  Still in the same
+sneering manner, laying particular stress on the "business," he brought
+my case before the commanding officer.  The major was of a different
+stamp of man.  I liked him as soon as I saw him, and to him I stated my
+case in the same fashion as before.
+
+"Didn't you know you had to stay for services?" he asked.
+
+"Certainly not," I answered, "or I should have gone without my breakfast.
+You have no placards posted to that effect, nor was I so informed when I
+entered the place."
+
+He meditated a moment.  "You can go," he said.
+
+It was twelve o'clock when I gained the street, and I couldn't quite make
+up my mind whether I had been in the army or in prison.  The day was half
+gone, and it was a far fetch to Stepney.  And besides, it was Sunday, and
+why should even a starving man look for work on Sunday?  Furthermore, it
+was my judgment that I had done a hard night's work walking the streets,
+and a hard day's work getting my breakfast; so I disconnected myself from
+my working hypothesis of a starving young man in search of employment,
+hailed a bus, and climbed aboard.
+
+After a shave and a bath, with my clothes all off, I got in between clean
+white sheets and went to sleep.  It was six in the evening when I closed
+my eyes.  When they opened again, the clocks were striking nine next
+morning.  I had slept fifteen straight hours.  And as I lay there
+drowsily, my mind went back to the seven hundred unfortunates I had left
+waiting for services.  No bath, no shave for them, no clean white sheets
+and all clothes off, and fifteen hours' straight sleep.  Services over,
+it was the weary streets again, the problem of a crust of bread ere
+night, and the long sleepless night in the streets, and the pondering of
+the problem of how to obtain a crust at dawn.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII--CORONATION DAY
+
+
+   O thou that sea-walls sever
+   From lands unwalled by seas!
+   Wilt thou endure forever,
+   O Milton's England, these?
+   Thou that wast his Republic,
+   Wilt thou clasp their knees?
+   These royalties rust-eaten,
+   These worm-corroded lies
+   That keep thy head storm-beaten,
+   And sun-like strength of eyes
+   From the open air and heaven
+   Of intercepted skies!
+
+   SWINBURNE.
+
+Vivat Rex Eduardus!  They crowned a king this day, and there has been
+great rejoicing and elaborate tomfoolery, and I am perplexed and
+saddened.  I never saw anything to compare with the pageant, except
+Yankee circuses and Alhambra ballets; nor did I ever see anything so
+hopeless and so tragic.
+
+To have enjoyed the Coronation procession, I should have come straight
+from America to the Hotel Cecil, and straight from the Hotel Cecil to a
+five-guinea seat among the washed.  My mistake was in coming from the
+unwashed of the East End.  There were not many who came from that
+quarter.  The East End, as a whole, remained in the East End and got
+drunk.  The Socialists, Democrats, and Republicans went off to the
+country for a breath of fresh air, quite unaffected by the fact that four
+hundred millions of people were taking to themselves a crowned and
+anointed ruler.  Six thousand five hundred prelates, priests, statesmen,
+princes, and warriors beheld the crowning and anointing, and the rest of
+us the pageant as it passed.
+
+I saw it at Trafalgar Square, "the most splendid site in Europe," and the
+very innermost heart of the empire.  There were many thousands of us, all
+checked and held in order by a superb display of armed power.  The line
+of march was double-walled with soldiers.  The base of the Nelson Column
+was triple-fringed with bluejackets.  Eastward, at the entrance to the
+square, stood the Royal Marine Artillery.  In the triangle of Pall Mall
+and Cockspur Street, the statue of George III. was buttressed on either
+side by the Lancers and Hussars.  To the west were the red-coats of the
+Royal Marines, and from the Union Club to the embouchure of Whitehall
+swept the glittering, massive curve of the 1st Life Guards--gigantic men
+mounted on gigantic chargers, steel-breastplated, steel-helmeted, steel-
+caparisoned, a great war-sword of steel ready to the hand of the powers
+that be.  And further, throughout the crowd, were flung long lines of the
+Metropolitan Constabulary, while in the rear were the reserves--tall,
+well-fed men, with weapons to wield and muscles to wield them in ease of
+need.
+
+And as it was thus at Trafalgar Square, so was it along the whole line of
+march--force, overpowering force; myriads of men, splendid men, the pick
+of the people, whose sole function in life is blindly to obey, and
+blindly to kill and destroy and stamp out life.  And that they should be
+well fed, well clothed, and well armed, and have ships to hurl them to
+the ends of the earth, the East End of London, and the "East End" of all
+England, toils and rots and dies.
+
+There is a Chinese proverb that if one man lives in laziness another will
+die of hunger; and Montesquieu has said, "The fact that many men are
+occupied in making clothes for one individual is the cause of there being
+many people without clothes."  So one explains the other.  We cannot
+understand the starved and runty {2} toiler of the East End (living with
+his family in a one-room den, and letting out the floor space for
+lodgings to other starved and runty toilers) till we look at the
+strapping Life Guardsmen of the West End, and come to know that the one
+must feed and clothe and groom the other.
+
+And while in Westminster Abbey the people were taking unto themselves a
+king, I, jammed between the Life Guards and Constabulary of Trafalgar
+Square, was dwelling upon the time when the people of Israel first took
+unto themselves a king.  You all know how it runs.  The elders came to
+the prophet Samuel, and said: "Make us a king to judge us like all the
+nations."
+
+   And the Lord said unto Samuel: Now therefore hearken unto their voice;
+   howbeit thou shalt show them the manner of the king that shall reign
+   over them.
+
+   And Samuel told all the words of the Lord unto the people that asked
+   of him a king, and he said:
+
+   This will be the manner of the king that shall reign over you; he will
+   take your sons, and appoint them unto him, for his chariots, and to be
+   his horsemen, and they shall run before his chariots.
+
+   And he will appoint them unto him for captains of thousands, and
+   captains of fifties; and he will set some to plough his ground, and to
+   reap his harvest, and to make his instruments of war, and the
+   instruments of his chariots.
+
+   And he will take your daughters to be confectionaries, and to be
+   cooks, and to be bakers.
+
+   And he will take your fields and your vineyards, and your oliveyards,
+   even the best of them, and give them to his servants.
+
+   And he will take a tenth of your seed, and of your vineyards, and give
+   to his officers, and to his servants.
+
+   And he will take your menservants, and your maidservants, and your
+   goodliest young men, and your asses, and put them to his work.
+
+   He will take a tenth of your flocks; and ye shall be his servants.
+
+   And ye shall call out in that day because of your king which ye shall
+   have chosen you; and the Lord will not answer you in that day.
+
+All of which came to pass in that ancient day, and they did cry out to
+Samuel, saying: "Pray for thy servants unto the Lord thy God, that we die
+not; for we have added unto all our sins this evil, to ask us a king."
+And after Saul, David, and Solomon, came Rehoboam, who "answered the
+people roughly, saying: My father made your yoke heavy, but I will add to
+your yoke; my father chastised you with whips, but I will chastise you
+with scorpions."
+
+And in these latter days, five hundred hereditary peers own one-fifth of
+England; and they, and the officers and servants under the King, and
+those who go to compose the powers that be, yearly spend in wasteful
+luxury $1,850,000,000, or 370,000,000 pounds, which is thirty-two per
+cent. of the total wealth produced by all the toilers of the country.
+
+At the Abbey, clad in wonderful golden raiment, amid fanfare of trumpets
+and throbbing of music, surrounded by a brilliant throng of masters,
+lords, and rulers, the King was being invested with the insignia of his
+sovereignty.  The spurs were placed to his heels by the Lord Great
+Chamberlain, and a sword of state, in purple scabbard, was presented him
+by the Archbishop of Canterbury, with these words:-
+
+   Receive this kingly sword brought now from the altar of God, and
+   delivered to you by the hands of the bishops and servants of God,
+   though unworthy.
+
+Whereupon, being girded, he gave heed to the Archbishop's exhortation:-
+
+   With this sword do justice, stop the growth of iniquity, protect the
+   Holy Church of God, help and defend widows and orphans, restore the
+   things that are gone to decay, maintain the things that are restored,
+   punish and reform what is amiss, and confirm what is in good order.
+
+But hark!  There is cheering down Whitehall; the crowd sways, the double
+walls of soldiers come to attention, and into view swing the King's
+watermen, in fantastic mediaeval garbs of red, for all the world like the
+van of a circus parade.  Then a royal carriage, filled with ladies and
+gentlemen of the household, with powdered footmen and coachmen most
+gorgeously arrayed.  More carriages, lords, and chamberlains, viscounts,
+mistresses of the robes--lackeys all.  Then the warriors, a kingly
+escort, generals, bronzed and worn, from the ends of the earth come up to
+London Town, volunteer officers, officers of the militia and regular
+forces; Spens and Plumer, Broadwood and Cooper who relieved Ookiep,
+Mathias of Dargai, Dixon of Vlakfontein; General Gaselee and Admiral
+Seymour of China; Kitchener of Khartoum; Lord Roberts of India and all
+the world--the fighting men of England, masters of destruction, engineers
+of death!  Another race of men from those of the shops and slums, a
+totally different race of men.
+
+But here they come, in all the pomp and certitude of power, and still
+they come, these men of steel, these war lords and world harnessers.  Pell-
+mell, peers and commoners, princes and maharajahs, Equerries to the King
+and Yeomen of the Guard.  And here the colonials, lithe and hardy men;
+and here all the breeds of all the world-soldiers from Canada, Australia,
+New Zealand; from Bermuda, Borneo, Fiji, and the Gold Coast; from
+Rhodesia, Cape Colony, Natal, Sierra Leone and Gambia, Nigeria, and
+Uganda; from Ceylon, Cyprus, Hong-Kong, Jamaica, and Wei-Hai-Wei; from
+Lagos, Malta, St. Lucia, Singapore, Trinidad.  And here the conquered men
+of Ind, swarthy horsemen and sword wielders, fiercely barbaric, blazing
+in crimson and scarlet, Sikhs, Rajputs, Burmese, province by province,
+and caste by caste.
+
+And now the Horse Guards, a glimpse of beautiful cream ponies, and a
+golden panoply, a hurricane of cheers, the crashing of bands--"The King!
+the King!  God save the King!"  Everybody has gone mad.  The contagion is
+sweeping me off my feet--I, too, want to shout, "The King!  God save the
+King!"  Ragged men about me, tears in their eyes, are tossing up their
+hats and crying ecstatically, "Bless 'em!  Bless 'em!  Bless 'em!"  See,
+there he is, in that wondrous golden coach, the great crown flashing on
+his head, the woman in white beside him likewise crowned.
+
+And I check myself with a rush, striving to convince myself that it is
+all real and rational, and not some glimpse of fairyland.  This I cannot
+succeed in doing, and it is better so.  I much prefer to believe that all
+this pomp, and vanity, and show, and mumbo-jumbo foolery has come from
+fairyland, than to believe it the performance of sane and sensible people
+who have mastered matter and solved the secrets of the stars.
+
+Princes and princelings, dukes, duchesses, and all manner of coroneted
+folk of the royal train are flashing past; more warriors, and lackeys,
+and conquered peoples, and the pagent is over.  I drift with the crowd
+out of the square into a tangle of narrow streets, where the
+public-houses are a-roar with drunkenness, men, women, and children mixed
+together in colossal debauch.  And on every side is rising the favourite
+song of the Coronation:-
+
+   "Oh! on Coronation Day, on Coronation Day,
+   We'll have a spree, a jubilee, and shout, Hip, hip, hooray,
+   For we'll all be marry, drinking whisky, wine, and sherry,
+   We'll all be merry on Coronation Day."
+
+The rain is pouring down.  Up the street come troops of the auxiliaries,
+black Africans and yellow Asiatics, beturbaned and befezed, and coolies
+swinging along with machine guns and mountain batteries on their heads,
+and the bare feet of all, in quick rhythm, going _slish, slish, slish_
+through the pavement mud.  The public-houses empty by magic, and the
+swarthy allegiants are cheered by their British brothers, who return at
+once to the carouse.
+
+"And how did you like the procession, mate?" I asked an old man on a
+bench in Green Park.
+
+"'Ow did I like it?  A bloomin' good chawnce, sez I to myself, for a
+sleep, wi' all the coppers aw'y, so I turned into the corner there, along
+wi' fifty others.  But I couldn't sleep, a-lyin' there an' thinkin' 'ow
+I'd worked all the years o' my life an' now 'ad no plyce to rest my 'ead;
+an' the music comin' to me, an' the cheers an' cannon, till I got almost
+a hanarchist an' wanted to blow out the brains o' the Lord Chamberlain."
+
+Why the Lord Chamberlain I could not precisely see, nor could he, but
+that was the way he felt, he said conclusively, and them was no more
+discussion.
+
+As night drew on, the city became a blaze of light.  Splashes of colour,
+green, amber, and ruby, caught the eye at every point, and "E. R.," in
+great crystal letters and backed by flaming gas, was everywhere.  The
+crowds in the streets increased by hundreds of thousands, and though the
+police sternly put down mafficking, drunkenness and rough play abounded.
+The tired workers seemed to have gone mad with the relaxation and
+excitement, and they surged and danced down the streets, men and women,
+old and young, with linked arms and in long rows, singing, "I may be
+crazy, but I love you," "Dolly Gray," and "The Honeysuckle and the
+Bee"--the last rendered something like this:-
+
+   "Yew aw the enny, ennyseckle, Oi em ther bee,
+   Oi'd like ter sip ther enny from those red lips, yew see."
+
+I sat on a bench on the Thames Embankment, looking across the illuminated
+water.  It was approaching midnight, and before me poured the better
+class of merrymakers, shunning the more riotous streets and returning
+home.  On the bench beside me sat two ragged creatures, a man and a
+woman, nodding and dozing.  The woman sat with her arms clasped across
+the breast, holding tightly, her body in constant play--now dropping
+forward till it seemed its balance would be overcome and she would fall
+to the pavement; now inclining to the left, sideways, till her head
+rested on the man's shoulder; and now to the right, stretched and
+strained, till the pain of it awoke her and she sat bolt upright.
+Whereupon the dropping forward would begin again and go through its cycle
+till she was aroused by the strain and stretch.
+
+Every little while boys and young men stopped long enough to go behind
+the bench and give vent to sudden and fiendish shouts.  This always
+jerked the man and woman abruptly from their sleep; and at sight of the
+startled woe upon their faces the crowd would roar with laughter as it
+flooded past.
+
+This was the most striking thing, the general heartlessness exhibited on
+every hand.  It is a commonplace, the homeless on the benches, the poor
+miserable folk who may be teased and are harmless.  Fifty thousand people
+must have passed the bench while I sat upon it, and not one, on such a
+jubilee occasion as the crowning of the King, felt his heart-strings
+touched sufficiently to come up and say to the woman: "Here's sixpence;
+go and get a bed."  But the women, especially the young women, made witty
+remarks upon the woman nodding, and invariably set their companions
+laughing.
+
+To use a Briticism, it was "cruel"; the corresponding Americanism was
+more appropriate--it was "fierce."  I confess I began to grow incensed at
+this happy crowd streaming by, and to extract a sort of satisfaction from
+the London statistics which demonstrate that one in every four adults is
+destined to die on public charity, either in the workhouse, the
+infirmary, or the asylum.
+
+I talked with the man.  He was fifty-four and a broken-down docker.  He
+could only find odd work when there was a large demand for labour, for
+the younger and stronger men were preferred when times were slack.  He
+had spent a week, now, on the benches of the Embankment; but things
+looked brighter for next week, and he might possibly get in a few days'
+work and have a bed in some doss-house.  He had lived all his life in
+London, save for five years, when, in 1878, he saw foreign service in
+India.
+
+Of course he would eat; so would the girl.  Days like this were uncommon
+hard on such as they, though the coppers were so busy poor folk could get
+in more sleep.  I awoke the girl, or woman, rather, for she was "Eyght
+an' twenty, sir," and we started for a coffee-house.
+
+"Wot a lot o' work puttin' up the lights," said the man at sight of some
+building superbly illuminated.  This was the keynote of his being.  All
+his life he had worked, and the whole objective universe, as well as his
+own soul, he could express in terms only of work.  "Coronations is some
+good," he went on.  "They give work to men."
+
+"But your belly is empty," I said.
+
+"Yes," he answered.  "I tried, but there wasn't any chawnce.  My age is
+against me.  Wot do you work at?  Seafarin' chap, eh?  I knew it from yer
+clothes."
+
+"I know wot you are," said the girl, "an Eyetalian."
+
+"No 'e ayn't," the man cried heatedly.  "'E's a Yank, that's wot 'e is.  I
+know."
+
+"Lord lumne, look a' that," she exclaimed, as we debauched upon the
+Strand, choked with the roaring, reeling Coronation crowd, the men
+bellowing and the girls singing in high throaty notes:-
+
+   "Oh! on Coronation D'y, on Coronation D'y,
+   We'll 'ave a spree, a jubilee, an' shout 'Ip, 'ip, 'ooray;
+   For we'll all be merry, drinkin' whisky, wine, and sherry,
+   We'll all be merry on Coronation D'y."
+
+"'Ow dirty I am, bein' around the w'y I 'ave," the woman said, as she sat
+down in a coffee-house, wiping the sleep and grime from the corners of
+her eyes.  "An' the sights I 'ave seen this d'y, an' I enjoyed it, though
+it was lonesome by myself.  An' the duchesses an' the lydies 'ad sich
+gran' w'ite dresses.  They was jest bu'ful, bu'ful."
+
+"I'm Irish," she said, in answer to a question.  "My nyme's Eyethorne."
+
+"What?" I asked.
+
+"Eyethorne, sir; Eyethorne."
+
+"Spell it."
+
+"H-a-y-t-h-o-r-n-e, Eyethorne.'
+
+"Oh," I said, "Irish Cockney."
+
+"Yes, sir, London-born."
+
+She had lived happily at home till her father died, killed in an
+accident, when she had found herself on the world.  One brother was in
+the army, and the other brother, engaged in keeping a wife and eight
+children on twenty shillings a week and unsteady employment, could do
+nothing for her.  She had been out of London once in her life, to a place
+in Essex, twelve miles away, where she had picked fruit for three weeks:
+"An' I was as brown as a berry w'en I come back.  You won't b'lieve it,
+but I was."
+
+The last place in which she had worked was a coffee-house, hours from
+seven in the morning till eleven at night, and for which she had received
+five shillings a week and her food.  Then she had fallen sick, and since
+emerging from the hospital had been unable to find anything to do.  She
+wasn't feeling up to much, and the last two nights had been spent in the
+street.
+
+Between them they stowed away a prodigious amount of food, this man and
+woman, and it was not till I had duplicated and triplicated their
+original orders that they showed signs of easing down.
+
+Once she reached across and felt the texture of my coat and shirt, and
+remarked upon the good clothes the Yanks wore.  My rags good clothes!  It
+put me to the blush; but, on inspecting them more closely and on
+examining the clothes worn by the man and woman, I began to feel quite
+well dressed and respectable.
+
+"What do you expect to do in the end?" I asked them.  "You know you're
+growing older every day."
+
+"Work'ouse," said he.
+
+"Gawd blimey if I do," said she.  "There's no 'ope for me, I know, but
+I'll die on the streets.  No work'ouse for me, thank you.  No, indeed,"
+she sniffed in the silence that fell.
+
+"After you have been out all night in the streets," I asked, "what do you
+do in the morning for something to eat?"
+
+"Try to get a penny, if you 'aven't one saved over," the man explained.
+"Then go to a coffee-'ouse an' get a mug o' tea."
+
+"But I don't see how that is to feed you," I objected.
+
+The pair smiled knowingly.
+
+"You drink your tea in little sips," he went on, "making it last its
+longest.  An' you look sharp, an' there's some as leaves a bit be'ind
+'em."
+
+"It's s'prisin', the food wot some people leaves," the woman broke in.
+
+"The thing," said the man judicially, as the trick dawned upon me, "is to
+get 'old o' the penny."
+
+As we started to leave, Miss Haythorne gathered up a couple of crusts
+from the neighbouring tables and thrust them somewhere into her rags.
+
+"Cawn't wyste 'em, you know," said she; to which the docker nodded,
+tucking away a couple of crusts himself.
+
+At three in the morning I strolled up the Embankment.  It was a gala
+night for the homeless, for the police were elsewhere; and each bench was
+jammed with sleeping occupants.  There were as many women as men, and the
+great majority of them, male and female, were old.  Occasionally a boy
+was to be seen.  On one bench I noticed a family, a man sitting upright
+with a sleeping babe in his arms, his wife asleep, her head on his
+shoulder, and in her lap the head of a sleeping youngster.  The man's
+eyes were wide open.  He was staring out over the water and thinking,
+which is not a good thing for a shelterless man with a family to do.  It
+would not be a pleasant thing to speculate upon his thoughts; but this I
+know, and all London knows, that the cases of out-of-works killing their
+wives and babies is not an uncommon happening.
+
+One cannot walk along the Thames Embankment, in the small hours of
+morning, from the Houses of Parliament, past Cleopatra's Needle, to
+Waterloo Bridge, without being reminded of the sufferings, seven and
+twenty centuries old, recited by the author of "Job":-
+
+   There are that remove the landmarks; they violently take away flocks
+   and feed them.
+
+   They drive away the ass of the fatherless, they take the widow's ox
+   for a pledge.
+
+   They turn the needy out of the way; the poor of the earth hide
+   themselves together.
+
+   Behold, as wild asses in the desert they go forth to their work,
+   seeking diligently for meat; the wilderness yieldeth them food for
+   their children.
+
+   They cut their provender in the field, and they glean the vintage of
+   the wicked.
+
+   They lie all night naked without clothing, and have no covering in the
+   cold.
+
+   They are wet with the showers of the mountains, and embrace the rock
+   for want of a shelter.
+
+   There are that pluck the fatherless from the breast, and take a pledge
+   of the poor.
+
+   So that they go about naked without clothing, and being an hungered
+   they carry the sheaves.--Job xxiv. 2-10.
+
+Seven and twenty centuries agone!  And it is all as true and apposite to-
+day in the innermost centre of this Christian civilisation whereof Edward
+VII. is king.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII--DAN CULLEN, DOCKER
+
+
+I stood, yesterday, in a room in one of the "Municipal Dwellings," not
+far from Leman Street.  If I looked into a dreary future and saw that I
+would have to live in such a room until I died, I should immediately go
+down, plump into the Thames, and cut the tenancy short.
+
+It was not a room.  Courtesy to the language will no more permit it to be
+called a room than it will permit a hovel to be called a mansion.  It was
+a den, a lair.  Seven feet by eight were its dimensions, and the ceiling
+was so low as not to give the cubic air space required by a British
+soldier in barracks.  A crazy couch, with ragged coverlets, occupied
+nearly half the room.  A rickety table, a chair, and a couple of boxes
+left little space in which to turn around.  Five dollars would have
+purchased everything in sight.  The floor was bare, while the walls and
+ceiling were literally covered with blood marks and splotches.  Each mark
+represented a violent death--of an insect, for the place swarmed with
+vermin, a plague with which no person could cope single-handed.
+
+The man who had occupied this hole, one Dan Cullen, docker, was dying in
+hospital.  Yet he had impressed his personality on his miserable
+surroundings sufficiently to give an inkling as to what sort of man he
+was.  On the walls were cheap pictures of Garibaldi, Engels, Dan Burns,
+and other labour leaders, while on the table lay one of Walter Besant's
+novels.  He knew his Shakespeare, I was told, and had read history,
+sociology, and economics.  And he was self-educated.
+
+On the table, amidst a wonderful disarray, lay a sheet of paper on which
+was scrawled: _Mr. Cullen, please return the large white jug and
+corkscrew I lent you_--articles loaned, during the first stages of his
+sickness, by a woman neighbour, and demanded back in anticipation of his
+death.  A large white jug and a corkscrew are far too valuable to a
+creature of the Abyss to permit another creature to die in peace.  To the
+last, Dan Cullen's soul must be harrowed by the sordidness out of which
+it strove vainly to rise.
+
+It is a brief little story, the story of Dan Cullen, but there is much to
+read between the lines.  He was born lowly, in a city and land where the
+lines of caste are tightly drawn.  All his days he toiled hard with his
+body; and because he had opened the books, and been caught up by the
+fires of the spirit, and could "write a letter like a lawyer," he had
+been selected by his fellows to toil hard for them with his brain.  He
+became a leader of the fruit-porters, represented the dockers on the
+London Trades Council, and wrote trenchant articles for the labour
+journals.
+
+He did not cringe to other men, even though they were his economic
+masters, and controlled the means whereby he lived, and he spoke his mind
+freely, and fought the good fight.  In the "Great Dock Strike" he was
+guilty of taking a leading part.  And that was the end of Dan Cullen.
+From that day he was a marked man, and every day, for ten years and more,
+he was "paid off" for what he had done.
+
+A docker is a casual labourer.  Work ebbs and flows, and he works or does
+not work according to the amount of goods on hand to be moved.  Dan
+Cullen was discriminated against.  While he was not absolutely turned
+away (which would have caused trouble, and which would certainly have
+been more merciful), he was called in by the foreman to do not more than
+two or three days' work per week.  This is what is called being
+"disciplined," or "drilled."  It means being starved.  There is no
+politer word.  Ten years of it broke his heart, and broken-hearted men
+cannot live.
+
+He took to his bed in his terrible den, which grew more terrible with his
+helplessness.  He was without kith or kin, a lonely old man, embittered
+and pessimistic, fighting vermin the while and looking at Garibaldi,
+Engels, and Dan Burns gazing down at him from the blood-bespattered
+walls.  No one came to see him in that crowded municipal barracks (he had
+made friends with none of them), and he was left to rot.
+
+But from the far reaches of the East End came a cobbler and his son, his
+sole friends.  They cleansed his room, brought fresh linen from home, and
+took from off his limbs the sheets, greyish-black with dirt.  And they
+brought to him one of the Queen's Bounty nurses from Aldgate.
+
+She washed his face, shook up his conch, and talked with him.  It was
+interesting to talk with him--until he learned her name.  Oh, yes, Blank
+was her name, she replied innocently, and Sir George Blank was her
+brother.  Sir George Blank, eh? thundered old Dan Cullen on his death-
+bed; Sir George Blank, solicitor to the docks at Cardiff, who, more than
+any other man, had broken up the Dockers' Union of Cardiff, and was
+knighted?  And she was his sister?  Thereupon Dan Cullen sat up on his
+crazy couch and pronounced anathema upon her and all her breed; and she
+fled, to return no more, strongly impressed with the ungratefulness of
+the poor.
+
+Dan Cullen's feet became swollen with dropsy.  He sat up all day on the
+side of the bed (to keep the water out of his body), no mat on the floor,
+a thin blanket on his legs, and an old coat around his shoulders.  A
+missionary brought him a pair of paper slippers, worth fourpence (I saw
+them), and proceeded to offer up fifty prayers or so for the good of Dan
+Cullen's soul.  But Dan Cullen was the sort of man that wanted his soul
+left alone.  He did not care to have Tom, Dick, or Harry, on the strength
+of fourpenny slippers, tampering with it.  He asked the missionary kindly
+to open the window, so that he might toss the slippers out.  And the
+missionary went away, to return no more, likewise impressed with the
+ungratefulness of the poor.
+
+The cobbler, a brave old hero himself, though unaneled and unsung, went
+privily to the head office of the big fruit brokers for whom Dan Cullen
+had worked as a casual labourer for thirty years.  Their system was such
+that the work was almost entirely done by casual hands.  The cobbler told
+them the man's desperate plight, old, broken, dying, without help or
+money, reminded them that he had worked for them thirty years, and asked
+them to do something for him.
+
+"Oh," said the manager, remembering Dan Cullen without having to refer to
+the books, "you see, we make it a rule never to help casuals, and we can
+do nothing."
+
+Nor did they do anything, not even sign a letter asking for Dan Cullen's
+admission to a hospital.  And it is not so easy to get into a hospital in
+London Town.  At Hampstead, if he passed the doctors, at least four
+months would elapse before he could get in, there were so many on the
+books ahead of him.  The cobbler finally got him into the Whitechapel
+Infirmary, where he visited him frequently.  Here he found that Dan
+Cullen had succumbed to the prevalent feeling, that, being hopeless, they
+were hurrying him out of the way.  A fair and logical conclusion, one
+must agree, for an old and broken man to arrive at, who has been
+resolutely "disciplined" and "drilled" for ten years.  When they sweated
+him for Bright's disease to remove the fat from the kidneys, Dan Cullen
+contended that the sweating was hastening his death; while Bright's
+disease, being a wasting away of the kidneys, there was therefore no fat
+to remove, and the doctor's excuse was a palpable lie.  Whereupon the
+doctor became wroth, and did not come near him for nine days.
+
+Then his bed was tilted up so that his feet and legs were elevated.  At
+once dropsy appeared in the body, and Dan Cullen contended that the thing
+was done in order to run the water down into his body from his legs and
+kill him more quickly.  He demanded his discharge, though they told him
+he would die on the stairs, and dragged himself, more dead than alive, to
+the cobbler's shop.  At the moment of writing this, he is dying at the
+Temperance Hospital, into which place his staunch friend, the cobbler,
+moved heaven and earth to have him admitted.
+
+Poor Dan Cullen!  A Jude the Obscure, who reached out after knowledge;
+who toiled with his body in the day and studied in the watches of the
+night; who dreamed his dream and struck valiantly for the Cause; a
+patriot, a lover of human freedom, and a fighter unafraid; and in the
+end, not gigantic enough to beat down the conditions which baffled and
+stifled him, a cynic and a pessimist, gasping his final agony on a
+pauper's couch in a charity ward,--"For a man to die who might have been
+wise and was not, this I call a tragedy."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV--HOPS AND HOPPERS
+
+
+So far has the divorcement of the worker from the soil proceeded, that
+the farming districts, the civilised world over, are dependent upon the
+cities for the gathering of the harvests.  Then it is, when the land is
+spilling its ripe wealth to waste, that the street folk, who have been
+driven away from the soil, are called back to it again.  But in England
+they return, not as prodigals, but as outcasts still, as vagrants and
+pariahs, to be doubted and flouted by their country brethren, to sleep in
+jails and casual wards, or under the hedges, and to live the Lord knows
+how.
+
+It is estimated that Kent alone requires eighty thousand of the street
+people to pick her hops.  And out they come, obedient to the call, which
+is the call of their bellies and of the lingering dregs of adventure-lust
+still in them.  Slum, stews, and ghetto pour them forth, and the
+festering contents of slum, stews, and ghetto are undiminished.  Yet they
+overrun the country like an army of ghouls, and the country does not want
+them.  They are out of place.  As they drag their squat, misshapen bodies
+along the highways and byways, they resemble some vile spawn from
+underground.  Their very presence, the fact of their existence, is an
+outrage to the fresh, bright sun and the green and growing things.  The
+clean, upstanding trees cry shame upon them and their withered
+crookedness, and their rottenness is a slimy desecration of the sweetness
+and purity of nature.
+
+Is the picture overdrawn?  It all depends.  For one who sees and thinks
+life in terms of shares and coupons, it is certainly overdrawn.  But for
+one who sees and thinks life in terms of manhood and womanhood, it cannot
+be overdrawn.  Such hordes of beastly wretchedness and inarticulate
+misery are no compensation for a millionaire brewer who lives in a West
+End palace, sates himself with the sensuous delights of London's golden
+theatres, hobnobs with lordlings and princelings, and is knighted by the
+king.  Wins his spurs--God forbid!  In old time the great blonde beasts
+rode in the battle's van and won their spurs by cleaving men from pate to
+chine.  And, after all, it is finer to kill a strong man with a clean-
+slicing blow of singing steel than to make a beast of him, and of his
+seed through the generations, by the artful and spidery manipulation of
+industry and politics.
+
+But to return to the hops.  Here the divorcement from the soil is as
+apparent as in every other agricultural line in England.  While the
+manufacture of beer steadily increases, the growth of hops steadily
+decreases.  In 1835 the acreage under hops was 71,327.  To-day it stands
+at 48,024, a decrease of 3103 from the acreage of last year.
+
+Small as the acreage is this year, a poor summer and terrible storms
+reduced the yield.  This misfortune is divided between the people who own
+hops and the people who pick hops.  The owners perforce must put up with
+less of the nicer things of life, the pickers with less grub, of which,
+in the best of times, they never get enough.  For weary weeks headlines
+like the following have appeared in the London papers.-
+
+   TRAMPS PLENTIFUL, BUT THE HOPS ARE FEW AND NOT YET READY.
+
+Then there have been numberless paragraphs like this:-
+
+   From the neighbourhood of the hop fields comes news of a distressing
+   nature.  The bright outburst of the last two days has sent many
+   hundreds of hoppers into Kent, who will have to wait till the fields
+   are ready for them.  At Dover the number of vagrants in the workhouse
+   is treble the number there last year at this time, and in other towns
+   the lateness of the season is responsible for a large increase in the
+   number of casuals.
+
+To cap their wretchedness, when at last the picking had begun, hops and
+hoppers were well-nigh swept away by a frightful storm of wind, rain, and
+hail.  The hops were stripped clean from the poles and pounded into the
+earth, while the hoppers, seeking shelter from the stinging hail, were
+close to drowning in their huts and camps on the low-lying ground.  Their
+condition after the storm was pitiable, their state of vagrancy more
+pronounced than ever; for, poor crop that it was, its destruction had
+taken away the chance of earning a few pennies, and nothing remained for
+thousands of them but to "pad the hoof" back to London.
+
+"We ayn't crossin'-sweepers," they said, turning away from the ground,
+carpeted ankle-deep with hops.
+
+Those that remained grumbled savagely among the half-stripped poles at
+the seven bushels for a shilling--a rate paid in good seasons when the
+hops are in prime condition, and a rate likewise paid in bad seasons by
+the growers because they cannot afford more.
+
+I passed through Teston and East and West Farleigh shortly after the
+storm, and listened to the grumbling of the hoppers and saw the hops
+rotting on the ground.  At the hothouses of Barham Court, thirty thousand
+panes of glass had been broken by the hail, while peaches, plums, pears,
+apples, rhubarb, cabbages, mangolds, everything, had been pounded to
+pieces and torn to shreds.
+
+All of which was too bad for the owners, certainly; but at the worst, not
+one of them, for one meal, would have to go short of food or drink.  Yet
+it was to them that the newspapers devoted columns of sympathy, their
+pecuniary losses being detailed at harrowing length.  "Mr. Herbert L---
+calculates his loss at 8000 pounds;" "Mr. F---, of brewery fame, who
+rents all the land in this parish, loses 10,000 pounds;" and "Mr. L---,
+the Wateringbury brewer, brother to Mr. Herbert L---, is another heavy
+loser."  As for the hoppers, they did not count.  Yet I venture to assert
+that the several almost-square meals lost by underfed William Buggles,
+and underfed Mrs. Buggles, and the underfed Buggles kiddies, was a
+greater tragedy than the 10,000 pounds lost by Mr. F---.  And in
+addition, underfed William Buggles' tragedy might be multiplied by
+thousands where Mr. F---'s could not be multiplied by five.
+
+To see how William Buggles and his kind fared, I donned my seafaring togs
+and started out to get a job.  With me was a young East London cobbler,
+Bert, who had yielded to the lure of adventure and joined me for the
+trip.  Acting on my advice, he had brought his "worst rags," and as we
+hiked up the London road out of Maidstone he was worrying greatly for
+fear we had come too ill-dressed for the business.
+
+Nor was he to be blamed.  When we stopped in a tavern the publican eyed
+us gingerly, nor did his demeanour brighten till we showed him the colour
+of our cash.  The natives along the coast were all dubious; and "bean-
+feasters" from London, dashing past in coaches, cheered and jeered and
+shouted insulting things after us.  But before we were done with the
+Maidstone district my friend found that we were as well clad, if not
+better, than the average hopper.  Some of the bunches of rags we chanced
+upon were marvellous.
+
+"The tide is out," called a gypsy-looking woman to her mates, as we came
+up a long row of bins into which the pickers were stripping the hops.
+
+"Do you twig?" Bert whispered.  "She's on to you."
+
+I twigged.  And it must be confessed the figure was an apt one.  When the
+tide is out boats are left on the beach and do not sail, and a sailor,
+when the tide is out, does not sail either.  My seafaring togs and my
+presence in the hop field proclaimed that I was a seaman without a ship,
+a man on the beach, and very like a craft at low water.
+
+"Can yer give us a job, governor?" Bert asked the bailiff, a kindly faced
+and elderly man who was very busy.
+
+His "No" was decisively uttered; but Bert clung on and followed him
+about, and I followed after, pretty well all over the field.  Whether our
+persistency struck the bailiff as anxiety to work, or whether he was
+affected by our hard-luck appearance and tale, neither Bert nor I
+succeeded in making out; but in the end he softened his heart and found
+us the one unoccupied bin in the place--a bin deserted by two other men,
+from what I could learn, because of inability to make living wages.
+
+"No bad conduct, mind ye," warned the bailiff, as he left us at work in
+the midst of the women.
+
+It was Saturday afternoon, and we knew quitting time would come early; so
+we applied ourselves earnestly to the task, desiring to learn if we could
+at least make our salt.  It was simple work, woman's work, in fact, and
+not man's.  We sat on the edge of the bin, between the standing hops,
+while a pole-puller supplied us with great fragrant branches.  In an
+hour's time we became as expert as it is possible to become.  As soon as
+the fingers became accustomed automatically to differentiate between hops
+and leaves and to strip half-a-dozen blossoms at a time there was no more
+to learn.
+
+We worked nimbly, and as fast as the women themselves, though their bins
+filled more rapidly because of their swarming children, each of which
+picked with two hands almost as fast as we picked.
+
+"Don'tcher pick too clean, it's against the rules," one of the women
+informed us; and we took the tip and were grateful.
+
+As the afternoon wore along, we realised that living wages could not be
+made--by men.  Women could pick as much as men, and children could do
+almost as well as women; so it was impossible for a man to compete with a
+woman and half-a-dozen children.  For it is the woman and the half-dozen
+children who count as a unit, and by their combined capacity determine
+the unit's pay.
+
+"I say, matey, I'm beastly hungry," said I to Bert.  We had not had any
+dinner.
+
+"Blimey, but I could eat the 'ops," he replied.
+
+Whereupon we both lamented our negligence in not rearing up a numerous
+progeny to help us in this day of need.  And in such fashion we whiled
+away the time and talked for the edification of our neighbours.  We quite
+won the sympathy of the pole-puller, a young country yokel, who now and
+again emptied a few picked blossoms into our bin, it being part of his
+business to gather up the stray clusters torn off in the process of
+pulling.
+
+With him we discussed how much we could "sub," and were informed that
+while we were being paid a shilling for seven bushels, we could only
+"sub," or have advanced to us, a shilling for every twelve bushels.  Which
+is to say that the pay for five out of every twelve bushels was
+withheld--a method of the grower to hold the hopper to his work whether
+the crop runs good or bad, and especially if it runs bad.
+
+After all, it was pleasant sitting there in the bright sunshine, the
+golden pollen showering from our hands, the pungent aromatic odour of the
+hops biting our nostrils, and the while remembering dimly the sounding
+cities whence these people came.  Poor street people!  Poor gutter folk!
+Even they grow earth-hungry, and yearn vaguely for the soil from which
+they have been driven, and for the free life in the open, and the wind
+and rain and sun all undefiled by city smirches.  As the sea calls to the
+sailor, so calls the land to them; and, deep down in their aborted and
+decaying carcasses, they are stirred strangely by the peasant memories of
+their forbears who lived before cities were.  And in incomprehensible
+ways they are made glad by the earth smells and sights and sounds which
+their blood has not forgotten though unremembered by them.
+
+"No more 'ops, matey," Bert complained.
+
+It was five o'clock, and the pole-pullers had knocked off, so that
+everything could be cleaned up, there being no work on Sunday.  For an
+hour we were forced idly to wait the coming of the measurers, our feet
+tingling with the frost which came on the heels of the setting sun.  In
+the adjoining bin, two women and half-a-dozen children had picked nine
+bushels: so that the five bushels the measurers found in our bin
+demonstrated that we had done equally well, for the half-dozen children
+had ranged from nine to fourteen years of age.
+
+Five bushels!  We worked it out to eight-pence ha'penny, or seventeen
+cents, for two men working three hours and a half.  Fourpence farthing
+apiece! a little over a penny an hour!  But we were allowed only to "sub"
+fivepence of the total sum, though the tally-keeper, short of change,
+gave us sixpence.  Entreaty was in vain.  A hard-luck story could not
+move him.  He proclaimed loudly that we had received a penny more than
+our due, and went his way.
+
+Granting, for the sake of the argument, that we were what we represented
+ourselves to be--namely, poor men and broke--then here was out position:
+night was coming on; we had had no supper, much less dinner; and we
+possessed sixpence between us.  I was hungry enough to eat three
+sixpenn'orths of food, and so was Bert.  One thing was patent.  By doing
+16.3 per cent. justice to our stomachs, we would expend the sixpence, and
+our stomachs would still be gnawing under 83.3 per cent. injustice.  Being
+broke again, we could sleep under a hedge, which was not so bad, though
+the cold would sap an undue portion of what we had eaten.  But the morrow
+was Sunday, on which we could do no work, though our silly stomachs would
+not knock off on that account.  Here, then, was the problem: how to get
+three meals on Sunday, and two on Monday (for we could not make another
+"sub" till Monday evening).
+
+We knew that the casual wards were overcrowded; also, that if we begged
+from farmer or villager, there was a large likelihood of our going to
+jail for fourteen days.  What was to be done?  We looked at each other in
+despair--
+
+--Not a bit of it.  We joyfully thanked God that we were not as other
+men, especially hoppers, and went down the road to Maidstone, jingling in
+our pockets the half-crowns and florins we had brought from London.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV--THE SEA WIFE
+
+
+You might not expect to find the Sea Wife in the heart of Kent, but that
+is where I found her, in a mean street, in the poor quarter of Maidstone.
+In her window she had no sign of lodgings to let, and persuasion was
+necessary before she could bring herself to let me sleep in her front
+room.  In the evening I descended to the semi-subterranean kitchen, and
+talked with her and her old man, Thomas Mugridge by name.
+
+And as I talked to them, all the subtleties and complexities of this
+tremendous machine civilisation vanished away.  It seemed that I went
+down through the skin and the flesh to the naked soul of it, and in
+Thomas Mugridge and his old woman gripped hold of the essence of this
+remarkable English breed.  I found there the spirit of the wanderlust
+which has lured Albion's sons across the zones; and I found there the
+colossal unreckoning which has tricked the English into foolish
+squabblings and preposterous fights, and the doggedness and stubbornness
+which have brought them blindly through to empire and greatness; and
+likewise I found that vast, incomprehensible patience which has enabled
+the home population to endure under the burden of it all, to toil without
+complaint through the weary years, and docilely to yield the best of its
+sons to fight and colonise to the ends of the earth.
+
+Thomas Mugridge was seventy-one years old and a little man.  It was
+because he was little that he had not gone for a soldier.  He had
+remained at home and worked.  His first recollections were connected with
+work.  He knew nothing else but work.  He had worked all his days, and at
+seventy-one he still worked.  Each morning saw him up with the lark and
+afield, a day labourer, for as such he had been born.  Mrs. Mugridge was
+seventy-three.  From seven years of age she had worked in the fields,
+doing a boy's work at first, and later a man's.  She still worked,
+keeping the house shining, washing, boiling, and baking, and, with my
+advent, cooking for me and shaming me by making my bed.  At the end of
+threescore years and more of work they possessed nothing, had nothing to
+look forward to save more work.  And they were contented.  They expected
+nothing else, desired nothing else.
+
+They lived simply.  Their wants were few--a pint of beer at the end of
+the day, sipped in the semi-subterranean kitchen, a weekly paper to pore
+over for seven nights hand-running, and conversation as meditative and
+vacant as the chewing of a heifer's cud.  From a wood engraving on the
+wall a slender, angelic girl looked down upon them, and underneath was
+the legend: "Our Future Queen."  And from a highly coloured lithograph
+alongside looked down a stout and elderly lady, with underneath: "Our
+Queen--Diamond Jubilee."
+
+"What you earn is sweetest," quoth Mrs. Mugridge, when I suggested that
+it was about time they took a rest.
+
+"No, an' we don't want help," said Thomas Mugridge, in reply to my
+question as to whether the children lent them a hand.
+
+"We'll work till we dry up and blow away, mother an' me," he added; and
+Mrs. Mugridge nodded her head in vigorous indorsement.
+
+Fifteen children she had borne, and all were away and gone, or dead.  The
+"baby," however, lived in Maidstone, and she was twenty-seven.  When the
+children married they had their hands full with their own families and
+troubles, like their fathers and mothers before them.
+
+Where were the children?  Ah, where were they not?  Lizzie was in
+Australia; Mary was in Buenos Ayres; Poll was in New York; Joe had died
+in India--and so they called them up, the living and the dead, soldier
+and sailor, and colonist's wife, for the traveller's sake who sat in
+their kitchen.
+
+They passed me a photograph.  A trim young fellow, in soldier's garb
+looked out at me.
+
+"And which son is this?" I asked.
+
+They laughed a hearty chorus.  Son!  Nay, grandson, just back from Indian
+service and a soldier-trumpeter to the King.  His brother was in the same
+regiment with him.  And so it ran, sons and daughters, and grand sons and
+daughters, world-wanderers and empire-builders, all of them, while the
+old folks stayed at home and worked at building empire too.
+
+   "There dwells a wife by the Northern Gate,
+      And a wealthy wife is she;
+   She breeds a breed o' rovin' men
+      And casts them over sea.
+
+   "And some are drowned in deep water,
+      And some in sight of shore;
+   And word goes back to the weary wife,
+      And ever she sends more."
+
+But the Sea Wife's child-bearing is about done.  The stock is running
+out, and the planet is filling up.  The wives of her sons may carry on
+the breed, but her work is past.  The erstwhile men of England are now
+the men of Australia, of Africa, of America.  England has sent forth "the
+best she breeds" for so long, and has destroyed those that remained so
+fiercely, that little remains for her to do but to sit down through the
+long nights and gaze at royalty on the wall.
+
+The true British merchant seaman has passed away.  The merchant service
+is no longer a recruiting ground for such sea dogs as fought with Nelson
+at Trafalgar and the Nile.  Foreigners largely man the merchant ships,
+though Englishmen still continue to officer them and to prefer foreigners
+for'ard.  In South Africa the colonial teaches the islander how to shoot,
+and the officers muddle and blunder; while at home the street people play
+hysterically at mafficking, and the War Office lowers the stature for
+enlistment.
+
+It could not be otherwise.  The most complacent Britisher cannot hope to
+draw off the life-blood, and underfeed, and keep it up forever.  The
+average Mrs. Thomas Mugridge has been driven into the city, and she is
+not breeding very much of anything save an anaemic and sickly progeny
+which cannot find enough to eat.  The strength of the English-speaking
+race to-day is not in the tight little island, but in the New World
+overseas, where are the sons and daughters of Mrs. Thomas Mugridge.  The
+Sea Wife by the Northern Gate has just about done her work in the world,
+though she does not realize it.  She must sit down and rest her tired
+loins for a space; and if the casual ward and the workhouse do not await
+her, it is because of the sons and daughters she has reared up against
+the day of her feebleness and decay.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI--PROPERTY VERSUS PERSON
+
+
+In a civilisation frankly materialistic and based upon property, not
+soul, it is inevitable that property shall be exalted over soul, that
+crimes against property shall be considered far more serious than crimes
+against the person.  To pound one's wife to a jelly and break a few of
+her ribs is a trivial offence compared with sleeping out under the naked
+stars because one has not the price of a doss.  The lad who steals a few
+pears from a wealthy railway corporation is a greater menace to society
+than the young brute who commits an unprovoked assault upon an old man
+over seventy years of age.  While the young girl who takes a lodging
+under the pretence that she has work commits so dangerous an offence,
+that, were she not severely punished, she and her kind might bring the
+whole fabric of property clattering to the ground.  Had she unholily
+tramped Piccadilly and the Strand after midnight, the police would not
+have interfered with her, and she would have been able to pay for her
+lodging.
+
+The following illustrative cases are culled from the police-court reports
+for a single week:-
+
+   Widnes Police Court.  Before Aldermen Gossage and Neil.  Thomas Lynch,
+   charged with being drunk and disorderly and with assaulting a
+   constable.  Defendant rescued a woman from custody, kicked the
+   constable, and threw stones at him.  Fined 3s. 6d. for the first
+   offence, and 10s. and costs for the assault.
+
+   Glasgow Queen's Park Police Court.  Before Baillie Norman Thompson.
+   John Kane pleaded guilty to assaulting his wife.  There were five
+   previous convictions.  Fined 2 pounds, 2s.
+
+   Taunton County Petty Sessions.  John Painter, a big, burly fellow,
+   described as a labourer, charged with assaulting his wife.  The woman
+   received two severe black eyes, and her face was badly swollen.  Fined
+   1 pound, 8s., including costs, and bound over to keep the peace.
+
+   Widnes Police Court.  Richard Bestwick and George Hunt, charged with
+   trespassing in search of game.  Hunt fined 1 pound and costs, Bestwick
+   2 pounds and costs; in default, one month.
+
+   Shaftesbury Police Court.  Before the Mayor (Mr. A. T. Carpenter).
+   Thomas Baker, charged with sleeping out.  Fourteen days.
+
+   Glasgow Central Police Court.  Before Bailie Dunlop.  Edward Morrison,
+   a lad, convicted of stealing fifteen pears from a lorry at the
+   railroad station.  Seven days.
+
+   Doncaster Borough Police Court.  Before Alderman Clark and other
+   magistrates.  James M'Gowan, charged under the Poaching Prevention Act
+   with being found in possession of poaching implements and a number of
+   rabbits.  Fined 2 pounds and costs, or one month.
+
+   Dunfermline Sheriff Court.  Before Sheriff Gillespie.  John Young, a
+   pit-head worker, pleaded guilty to assaulting Alexander Storrar by
+   beating him about the head and body with his fists, throwing him on
+   the ground, and also striking him with a pit prop.  Fined 1 pound.
+
+   Kirkcaldy Police Court.  Before Bailie Dishart.  Simon Walker pleaded
+   guilty to assaulting a man by striking and knocking him down.  It was
+   an unprovoked assault, and the magistrate described the accused as a
+   perfect danger to the community.  Fined 30s.
+
+   Mansfield Police Court.  Before the Mayor, Messrs. F. J. Turner, J.
+   Whitaker, F. Tidsbury, E. Holmes, and Dr. R. Nesbitt.  Joseph Jackson,
+   charged with assaulting Charles Nunn.  Without any provocation,
+   defendant struck the complainant a violent blow in the face, knocking
+   him down, and then kicked him on the side of the head.  He was
+   rendered unconscious, and he remained under medical treatment for a
+   fortnight.  Fined 21s.
+
+   Perth Sheriff Court.  Before Sheriff Sym.  David Mitchell, charged
+   with poaching.  There were two previous convictions, the last being
+   three years ago.  The sheriff was asked to deal leniently with
+   Mitchell, who was sixty-two years of age, and who offered no
+   resistance to the gamekeeper.  Four months.
+
+   Dundee Sheriff Court.  Before Hon. Sheriff-Substitute R. C. Walker.
+   John Murray, Donald Craig, and James Parkes, charged with poaching.
+   Craig and Parkes fined 1 pound each or fourteen days; Murray, 5 pounds
+   or one month.
+
+   Reading Borough Police Court.  Before Messrs. W. B. Monck, F. B.
+   Parfitt, H. M. Wallis, and G. Gillagan.  Alfred Masters, aged sixteen,
+   charged with sleeping out on a waste piece of ground and having no
+   visible means of subsistence.  Seven days.
+
+   Salisbury City Petty Sessions.  Before the Mayor, Messrs. C. Hoskins,
+   G. Fullford, E. Alexander, and W. Marlow.  James Moore, charged with
+   stealing a pair of boots from outside a shop.  Twenty-one days.
+
+   Horncastle Police Court.  Before the Rev. W. F. Massingberd, the Rev.
+   J. Graham, and Mr. N. Lucas Calcraft.  George Brackenbury, a young
+   labourer, convicted of what the magistrates characterised as an
+   altogether unprovoked and brutal assault upon James Sargeant Foster, a
+   man over seventy years of age.  Fined 1 pound and 5s. 6d. costs.
+
+   Worksop Petty Sessions.  Before Messrs. F. J. S. Foljambe, R. Eddison,
+   and S. Smith.  John Priestley, charged with assaulting the Rev. Leslie
+   Graham.  Defendant, who was drunk, was wheeling a perambulator and
+   pushed it in front of a lorry, with the result that the perambulator
+   was overturned and the baby in it thrown out.  The lorry passed over
+   the perambulator, but the baby was uninjured.  Defendant then attacked
+   the driver of the lorry, and afterwards assaulted the complainant, who
+   remonstrated with him upon his conduct.  In consequence of the
+   injuries defendant inflicted, complainant had to consult a doctor.
+   Fined 40s. and costs.
+
+   Rotherham West Riding Police Court.  Before Messrs. C. Wright and G.
+   Pugh and Colonel Stoddart.  Benjamin Storey, Thomas Brammer, and
+   Samuel Wilcock, charged with poaching.  One month each.
+
+   Southampton County Police Court.  Before Admiral J. C. Rowley, Mr. H.
+   H. Culme-Seymour, and other magistrates.  Henry Thorrington, charged
+   with sleeping out.  Seven days.
+
+   Eckington Police Court.  Before Major L. B. Bowden, Messrs. R. Eyre,
+   and H. A. Fowler, and Dr. Court.  Joseph Watts, charged with stealing
+   nine ferns from a garden.  One month.
+
+   Ripley Petty Sessions.  Before Messrs. J. B. Wheeler, W. D. Bembridge,
+   and M. Hooper.  Vincent Allen and George Hall, charged under the
+   Poaching Prevention Act with being found in possession of a number of
+   rabbits, and John Sparham, charged with aiding and abetting them.  Hall
+   and Sparham fined 1 pound, 17s. 4d., and Allen 2 pounds, 17s. 4d.,
+   including costs; the former committed for fourteen days and the latter
+   for one month in default of payment.
+
+   South-western Police Court, London.  Before Mr. Rose.  John Probyn,
+   charged with doing grievous bodily harm to a constable.  Prisoner had
+   been kicking his wife, and also assaulting another woman who protested
+   against his brutality.  The constable tried to persuade him to go
+   inside his house, but prisoner suddenly turned upon him, knocking him
+   down by a blow on the face, kicking him as he lay on the ground, and
+   attempting to strangle him.  Finally the prisoner deliberately kicked
+   the officer in a dangerous part, inflicting an injury which will keep
+   him off duty for a long time to come.  Six weeks.
+
+   Lambeth Police Court, London.  Before Mr. Hopkins.  "Baby" Stuart,
+   aged nineteen, described as a chorus girl, charged with obtaining food
+   and lodging to the value of 5s. by false pretences, and with intent to
+   defraud Emma Brasier.  Emma Brasier, complainant, lodging-house keeper
+   of Atwell Road.  Prisoner took apartments at her house on the
+   representation that she was employed at the Crown Theatre.  After
+   prisoner had been in her house two or three days, Mrs. Brasier made
+   inquiries, and, finding the girl's story untrue, gave her into
+   custody.  Prisoner told the magistrate that she would have worked had
+   she not had such bad health.  Six weeks' hard labour.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII--INEFFICIENCY
+
+
+I stopped a moment to listen to an argument on the Mile End Waste.  It
+was night-time, and they were all workmen of the better class.  They had
+surrounded one of their number, a pleasant-faced man of thirty, and were
+giving it to him rather heatedly.
+
+"But 'ow about this 'ere cheap immigration?" one of them demanded.  "The
+Jews of Whitechapel, say, a-cutting our throats right along?"
+
+"You can't blame them," was the answer.  "They're just like us, and
+they've got to live.  Don't blame the man who offers to work cheaper than
+you and gets your job."
+
+"But 'ow about the wife an' kiddies?" his interlocutor demanded.
+
+"There you are," came the answer.  "How about the wife and kiddies of the
+man who works cheaper than you and gets your job?  Eh?  How about his
+wife and kiddies?  He's more interested in them than in yours, and he
+can't see them starve.  So he cuts the price of labour and out you go.
+But you mustn't blame him, poor devil.  He can't help it.  Wages always
+come down when two men are after the same job.  That's the fault of
+competition, not of the man who cuts the price."
+
+"But wyges don't come down where there's a union," the objection was
+made.
+
+"And there you are again, right on the head.  The union cheeks
+competition among the labourers, but makes it harder where there are no
+unions.  There's where your cheap labour of Whitechapel comes in.  They're
+unskilled, and have no unions, and cut each other's throats, and ours in
+the bargain, if we don't belong to a strong union."
+
+Without going further into the argument, this man on the Mile End Waste
+pointed the moral that when two men were after the one job wages were
+bound to fall.  Had he gone deeper into the matter, he would have found
+that even the union, say twenty thousand strong, could not hold up wages
+if twenty thousand idle men were trying to displace the union men.  This
+is admirably instanced, just now, by the return and disbandment of the
+soldiers from South Africa.  They find themselves, by tens of thousands,
+in desperate straits in the army of the unemployed.  There is a general
+decline in wages throughout the land, which, giving rise to labour
+disputes and strikes, is taken advantage of by the unemployed, who gladly
+pick up the tools thrown down by the strikers.
+
+Sweating, starvation wages, armies of unemployed, and great numbers of
+the homeless and shelterless are inevitable when there are more men to do
+work than there is work for men to do.  The men and women I have met upon
+the streets, and in the spikes and pegs, are not there because as a mode
+of life it may be considered a "soft snap."  I have sufficiently outlined
+the hardships they undergo to demonstrate that their existence is
+anything but "soft."
+
+It is a matter of sober calculation, here in England, that it is softer
+to work for twenty shillings a week, and have regular food, and a bed at
+night, than it is to walk the streets.  The man who walks the streets
+suffers more, and works harder, for far less return.  I have depicted the
+nights they spend, and how, driven in by physical exhaustion, they go to
+the casual ward for a "rest up."  Nor is the casual ward a soft snap.  To
+pick four pounds of oakum, break twelve hundredweight of stones, or
+perform the most revolting tasks, in return for the miserable food and
+shelter they receive, is an unqualified extravagance on the part of the
+men who are guilty of it.  On the part of the authorities it is sheer
+robbery.  They give the men far less for their labour than do the
+capitalistic employers.  The wage for the same amount of labour,
+performed for a private employer, would buy them better beds, better
+food, more good cheer, and, above all, greater freedom.
+
+As I say, it is an extravagance for a man to patronise a casual ward.  And
+that they know it themselves is shown by the way these men shun it till
+driven in by physical exhaustion.  Then why do they do it?  Not because
+they are discouraged workers.  The very opposite is true; they are
+discouraged vagabonds.  In the United States the tramp is almost
+invariably a discouraged worker.  He finds tramping a softer mode of life
+than working.  But this is not true in England.  Here the powers that be
+do their utmost to discourage the tramp and vagabond, and he is, in all
+truth, a mightily discouraged creature.  He knows that two shillings a
+day, which is only fifty cents, will buy him three fair meals, a bed at
+night, and leave him a couple of pennies for pocket money.  He would
+rather work for those two shillings than for the charity of the casual
+ward; for he knows that he would not have to work so hard, and that he
+would not be so abominably treated.  He does not do so, however, because
+there are more men to do work than there is work for men to do.
+
+When there are more men than there is work to be done, a sifting-out
+process must obtain.  In every branch of industry the less efficient are
+crowded out.  Being crowded out because of inefficiency, they cannot go
+up, but must descend, and continue to descend, until they reach their
+proper level, a place in the industrial fabric where they are efficient.
+It follows, therefore, and it is inexorable, that the least efficient
+must descend to the very bottom, which is the shambles wherein they
+perish miserably.
+
+A glance at the confirmed inefficients at the bottom demonstrates that
+they are, as a rule, mental, physical, and moral wrecks.  The exceptions
+to the rule are the late arrivals, who are merely very inefficient, and
+upon whom the wrecking process is just beginning to operate.  All the
+forces here, it must be remembered, are destructive.  The good body
+(which is there because its brain is not quick and capable) is speedily
+wrenched and twisted out of shape; the clean mind (which is there because
+of its weak body) is speedily fouled and contaminated.
+
+The mortality is excessive, but, even then, they die far too lingering
+deaths.
+
+Here, then, we have the construction of the Abyss and the shambles.
+Throughout the whole industrial fabric a constant elimination is going
+on.  The inefficient are weeded out and flung downward.  Various things
+constitute inefficiency.  The engineer who is irregular or irresponsible
+will sink down until he finds his place, say as a casual labourer, an
+occupation irregular in its very nature and in which there is little or
+no responsibility.  Those who are slow and clumsy, who suffer from
+weakness of body or mind, or who lack nervous, mental, and physical
+stamina, must sink down, sometimes rapidly, sometimes step by step, to
+the bottom.  Accident, by disabling an efficient worker, will make him
+inefficient, and down he must go.  And the worker who becomes aged, with
+failing energy and numbing brain, must begin the frightful descent which
+knows no stopping-place short of the bottom and death.
+
+In this last instance, the statistics of London tell a terrible tale.  The
+population of London is one-seventh of the total population of the United
+Kingdom, and in London, year in and year out, one adult in every four
+dies on public charity, either in the workhouse, the hospital, or the
+asylum.  When the fact that the well-to-do do not end thus is taken into
+consideration, it becomes manifest that it is the fate of at least one in
+every three adult workers to die on public charity.
+
+As an illustration of how a good worker may suddenly become inefficient,
+and what then happens to him, I am tempted to give the case of M'Garry, a
+man thirty-two years of age, and an inmate of the workhouse.  The
+extracts are quoted from the annual report of the trade union.
+
+   I worked at Sullivan's place in Widnes, better known as the British
+   Alkali Chemical Works.  I was working in a shed, and I had to cross
+   the yard.  It was ten o'clock at night, and there was no light about.
+   While crossing the yard I felt something take hold of my leg and screw
+   it off.  I became unconscious; I didn't know what became of me for a
+   day or two.  On the following Sunday night I came to my senses, and
+   found myself in the hospital.  I asked the nurse what was to do with
+   my legs, and she told me both legs were off.
+
+   There was a stationary crank in the yard, let into the ground; the
+   hole was 18 inches long, 15 inches deep, and 15 inches wide.  The
+   crank revolved in the hole three revolutions a minute.  There was no
+   fence or covering over the hole.  Since my accident they have stopped
+   it altogether, and have covered the hole up with a piece of sheet
+   iron. . . . They gave me 25 pounds.  They didn't reckon that as
+   compensation; they said it was only for charity's sake.  Out of that I
+   paid 9 pounds for a machine by which to wheel myself about.
+
+   I was labouring at the time I got my legs off.  I got twenty-four
+   shillings a week, rather better pay than the other men, because I used
+   to take shifts.  When there was heavy work to be done I used to be
+   picked out to do it.  Mr. Manton, the manager, visited me at the
+   hospital several times.  When I was getting better, I asked him if he
+   would be able to find me a job.  He told me not to trouble myself, as
+   the firm was not cold-hearted.  I would be right enough in any case .
+   . . Mr. Manton stopped coming to see me; and the last time, he said he
+   thought of asking the directors to give me a fifty-pound note, so I
+   could go home to my friends in Ireland.
+
+Poor M'Garry!  He received rather better pay than the other men because
+he was ambitious and took shifts, and when heavy work was to be done he
+was the man picked out to do it.  And then the thing happened, and he
+went into the workhouse.  The alternative to the workhouse is to go home
+to Ireland and burden his friends for the rest of his life.  Comment is
+superfluous.
+
+It must be understood that efficiency is not determined by the workers
+themselves, but is determined by the demand for labour.  If three men
+seek one position, the most efficient man will get it.  The other two, no
+matter how capable they may be, will none the less be inefficients.  If
+Germany, Japan, and the United States should capture the entire world
+market for iron, coal, and textiles, at once the English workers would be
+thrown idle by hundreds of thousands.  Some would emigrate, but the rest
+would rush their labour into the remaining industries.  A general shaking
+up of the workers from top to bottom would result; and when equilibrium
+had been restored, the number of the inefficients at the bottom of the
+Abyss would have been increased by hundreds of thousands.  On the other
+hand, conditions remaining constant and all the workers doubling their
+efficiency, there would still be as many inefficients, though each
+inefficient were twice as capable as he had been and more capable than
+many of the efficients had previously been.
+
+When there are more men to work than there is work for men to do, just as
+many men as are in excess of work will be inefficients, and as
+inefficients they are doomed to lingering and painful destruction.  It
+shall be the aim of future chapters to show, by their work and manner of
+living, not only how the inefficients are weeded out and destroyed, but
+to show how inefficients are being constantly and wantonly created by the
+forces of industrial society as it exists to-day.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII--WAGES
+
+
+When I learned that in Lesser London there were 1,292,737 people who
+received twenty-one shillings or less a week per family, I became
+interested as to how the wages could best be spent in order to maintain
+the physical efficiency of such families.  Families of six, seven, eight
+or ten being beyond consideration, I have based the following table upon
+a family of five--a father, mother, and three children; while I have made
+twenty-one shillings equivalent to $5.25, though actually, twenty-one
+shillings are equivalent to about $5.11.
+
+Rent       $1.50    or 6/0
+Bread       1.00    " 4/0
+Meat        O.87.5  " 3/6
+Vegetables  O.62.5  " 2/6
+Coals       0.25    " 1/0
+Tea         0.18    " 0/9
+Oil         0.16    " 0/8
+Sugar       0.18    " 0/9
+Milk        0.12    " 0/6
+Soap        0.08    " 0/4
+Butter      0.20    " 0/10
+Firewood    0.08    " 0/4
+Total      $5.25     21/2
+
+An analysis of one item alone will show how little room there is for
+waste.  _Bread_, $1: for a family of five, for seven days, one dollar's
+worth of bread will give each a daily ration of 2.8 cents; and if they
+eat three meals a day, each may consume per meal 9.5 mills' worth of
+bread, a little less than one halfpennyworth.  Now bread is the heaviest
+item.  They will get less of meat per mouth each meal, and still less of
+vegetates; while the smaller items become too microscopic for
+consideration.  On the other hand, these food articles are all bought at
+small retail, the most expensive and wasteful method of purchasing.
+
+While the table given above will permit no extravagance, no overloading
+of stomachs, it will be noticed that there is no surplus.  The whole
+guinea is spent for food and rent.  There is no pocket-money left over.
+Does the man buy a glass of beer, the family must eat that much less; and
+in so far as it eats less, just that far will it impair its physical
+efficiency.  The members of this family cannot ride in busses or trams,
+cannot write letters, take outings, go to a "tu'penny gaff" for cheap
+vaudeville, join social or benefit clubs, nor can they buy sweetmeats,
+tobacco, books, or newspapers.
+
+And further, should one child (and there are three) require a pair of
+shoes, the family must strike meat for a week from its bill of fare.  And
+since there are five pairs of feet requiring shoes, and five heads
+requiring hats, and five bodies requiring clothes, and since there are
+laws regulating indecency, the family must constantly impair its physical
+efficiency in order to keep warm and out of jail.  For notice, when rent,
+coals, oil, soap, and firewood are extracted from the weekly income,
+there remains a daily allowance for food of 4.5d. to each person; and
+that 4.5d. cannot be lessened by buying clothes without impairing the
+physical efficiency.
+
+All of which is hard enough.  But the thing happens; the husband and
+father breaks his leg or his neck.  No 4.5d. a day per mouth for food is
+coming in; no halfpennyworth of bread per meal; and, at the end of the
+week, no six shillings for rent.  So out they must go, to the streets or
+the workhouse, or to a miserable den, somewhere, in which the mother will
+desperately endeavour to hold the family together on the ten shillings
+she may possibly be able to earn.
+
+While in London there are 1,292,737 people who receive twenty-one
+shillings or less a week per family, it must be remembered that we have
+investigated a family of five living on a twenty-one shilling basis.
+There are larger families, there are many families that live on less than
+twenty-one shillings, and there is much irregular employment.  The
+question naturally arises, How do _they_ live?  The answer is that they
+do not live.  They do not know what life is.  They drag out a
+subterbestial existence until mercifully released by death.
+
+Before descending to the fouler depths, let the case of the telephone
+girls be cited.  Here are clean, fresh English maids, for whom a higher
+standard of living than that of the beasts is absolutely necessary.
+Otherwise they cannot remain clean, fresh English maids.  On entering the
+service, a telephone girl receives a weekly wage of eleven shillings.  If
+she be quick and clever, she may, at the end of five years, attain a
+minimum wage of one pound.  Recently a table of such a girl's weekly
+expenditure was furnished to Lord Londonderry.  Here it is:-
+
+                      s.   d.
+Rent, fire, and light 7    6
+Board at home         3    6
+Board at the office   4    6
+Street car fare       1    6
+Laundry               1    0
+Total                18    0
+
+This leaves nothing for clothes, recreation, or sickness.  And yet many
+of the girls are receiving, not eighteen shillings, but eleven shillings,
+twelve shillings, and fourteen shillings per week.  They must have
+clothes and recreation, and--
+
+   Man to Man so oft unjust,
+   Is always so to Woman.
+
+At the Trades Union Congress now being held in London, the Gasworkers'
+Union moved that instructions be given the Parliamentary Committee to
+introduce a Bill to prohibit the employment of children under fifteen
+years of age.  Mr. Shackleton, Member of Parliament and a representative
+of the Northern Counties Weavers, opposed the resolution on behalf of the
+textile workers, who, he said, could not dispense with the earnings of
+their children and live on the scale of wages which obtained.  The
+representatives of 514,000 workers voted against the resolution, while
+the representatives of 535,000 workers voted in favour of it.  When
+514,000 workers oppose a resolution prohibiting child-labour under
+fifteen, it is evident that a less-than-living wage is being paid to an
+immense number of the adult workers of the country.
+
+I have spoken with women in Whitechapel who receive right along less than
+one shilling for a twelve-hour day in the coat-making sweat shops; and
+with women trousers finishers who receive an average princely and weekly
+wage of three to four shillings.
+
+A case recently cropped up of men, in the employ of a wealthy business
+house, receiving their board and six shillings per week for six working
+days of sixteen hours each.  The sandwich men get fourteenpence per day
+and find themselves.  The average weekly earnings of the hawkers and
+costermongers are not more than ten to twelve shillings.  The average of
+all common labourers, outside the dockers, is less than sixteen shillings
+per week, while the dockers average from eight to nine shillings.  These
+figures are taken from a royal commission report and are authentic.
+
+Conceive of an old woman, broken and dying, supporting herself and four
+children, and paying three shillings per week rent, by making match boxes
+at 2.25d. per gross.  Twelve dozen boxes for 2.25d., and, in addition,
+finding her own paste and thread!  She never knew a day off, either for
+sickness, rest, or recreation.  Each day and every day, Sundays as well,
+she toiled fourteen hours.  Her day's stint was seven gross, for which
+she received 1s. 3.75d.  In the week of ninety-eight hours' work, she
+made 7066 match boxes, and earned 4s. 10.25d., less per paste and thread.
+
+Last year, Mr. Thomas Holmes, a police-court missionary of note, after
+writing about the condition of the women workers, received the following
+letter, dated April 18, 1901:-
+
+   Sir,--Pardon the liberty I am taking, but, having read what you said
+   about poor women working fourteen hours a day for ten shillings per
+   week, I beg to state my case.  I am a tie-maker, who, after working
+   all the week, cannot earn more than five shillings, and I have a poor
+   afflicted husband to keep who hasn't earned a penny for more than ten
+   years.
+
+Imagine a woman, capable of writing such a clear, sensible, grammatical
+letter, supporting her husband and self on five shillings per week!  Mr.
+Holmes visited her.  He had to squeeze to get into the room.  There lay
+her sick husband; there she worked all day long; there she cooked, ate,
+washed, and slept; and there her husband and she performed all the
+functions of living and dying.  There was no space for the missionary to
+sit down, save on the bed, which was partially covered with ties and
+silk.  The sick man's lungs were in the last stages of decay.  He coughed
+and expectorated constantly, the woman ceasing from her work to assist
+him in his paroxysms.  The silken fluff from the ties was not good for
+his sickness; nor was his sickness good for the ties, and the handlers
+and wearers of the ties yet to come.
+
+Another case Mr. Holmes visited was that of a young girl, twelve years of
+age, charged in the police court with stealing food.  He found her the
+deputy mother of a boy of nine, a crippled boy of seven, and a younger
+child.  Her mother was a widow and a blouse-maker.  She paid five
+shillings a week rent.  Here are the last items in her housekeeping
+account: Tea. 0.5d.; sugar, 0.5d.; bread, 0.25d.; margarine, 1d.; oil,
+1.5d.; and firewood, 1d.  Good housewives of the soft and tender folk,
+imagine yourselves marketing and keeping house on such a scale, setting a
+table for five, and keeping an eye on your deputy mother of twelve to see
+that she did not steal food for her little brothers and sisters, the
+while you stitched, stitched, stitched at a nightmare line of blouses,
+which stretched away into the gloom and down to the pauper's coffin a-
+yawn for you.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX--THE GHETTO
+
+
+   Is it well that while we range with Science, glorying in the time,
+   City children soak and blacken soul and sense in city slime?
+   There among the gloomy alleys Progress halts on palsied feet;
+   Crime and hunger cast out maidens by the thousand on the street;
+
+   There the master scrimps his haggard seamstress of her daily bread;
+   There the single sordid attic holds the living and the dead;
+   There the smouldering fire of fever creeps across the rotted floor,
+   And the crowded couch of incest, in the warrens of the poor.
+
+At one time the nations of Europe confined the undesirable Jews in city
+ghettos.  But to-day the dominant economic class, by less arbitrary but
+none the less rigorous methods, has confined the undesirable yet
+necessary workers into ghettos of remarkable meanness and vastness.  East
+London is such a ghetto, where the rich and the powerful do not dwell,
+and the traveller cometh not, and where two million workers swarm,
+procreate, and die.
+
+It must not be supposed that all the workers of London are crowded into
+the East End, but the tide is setting strongly in that direction.  The
+poor quarters of the city proper are constantly being destroyed, and the
+main stream of the unhoused is toward the east.  In the last twelve
+years, one district, "London over the Border," as it is called, which
+lies well beyond Aldgate, Whitechapel, and Mile End, has increased
+260,000, or over sixty per cent.  The churches in this district, by the
+way, can seat but one in every thirty-seven of the added population.
+
+The City of Dreadful Monotony, the East End is often called, especially
+by well-fed, optimistic sightseers, who look over the surface of things
+and are merely shocked by the intolerable sameness and meanness of it
+all.  If the East End is worthy of no worse title than The City of
+Dreadful Monotony, and if working people are unworthy of variety and
+beauty and surprise, it would not be such a bad place in which to live.
+But the East End does merit a worse title.  It should be called The City
+of Degradation.
+
+While it is not a city of slums, as some people imagine, it may well be
+said to be one gigantic slum.  From the standpoint of simple decency and
+clean manhood and womanhood, any mean street, of all its mean streets, is
+a slum.  Where sights and sounds abound which neither you nor I would
+care to have our children see and hear is a place where no man's children
+should live, and see, and hear.  Where you and I would not care to have
+our wives pass their lives is a place where no other man's wife should
+have to pass her life.  For here, in the East End, the obscenities and
+brute vulgarities of life are rampant.  There is no privacy.  The bad
+corrupts the good, and all fester together.  Innocent childhood is sweet
+and beautiful: but in East London innocence is a fleeting thing, and you
+must catch them before they crawl out of the cradle, or you will find the
+very babes as unholily wise as you.
+
+The application of the Golden Rule determines that East London is an
+unfit place in which to live.  Where you would not have your own babe
+live, and develop, and gather to itself knowledge of life and the things
+of life, is not a fit place for the babes of other men to live, and
+develop, and gather to themselves knowledge of life and the things of
+life.  It is a simple thing, this Golden Rule, and all that is required.
+Political economy and the survival of the fittest can go hang if they say
+otherwise.  What is not good enough for you is not good enough for other
+men, and there's no more to be said.
+
+There are 300,000 people in London, divided into families, that live in
+one-room tenements.  Far, far more live in two and three rooms and are as
+badly crowded, regardless of sex, as those that live in one room.  The
+law demands 400 cubic feet of space for each person.  In army barracks
+each soldier is allowed 600 cubic feet.  Professor Huxley, at one time
+himself a medical officer in East London, always held that each person
+should have 800 cubic feet of space, and that it should be well
+ventilated with pure air.  Yet in London there are 900,000 people living
+in less than the 400 cubic feet prescribed by the law.
+
+Mr. Charles Booth, who engaged in a systematic work of years in charting
+and classifying the toiling city population, estimates that there are
+1,800,000 people in London who are _poor_ and _very poor_.  It is of
+interest to mark what he terms poor.  By _poor_ he means families which
+have a total weekly income of from eighteen to twenty-one shillings.  The
+_very poor_ fall greatly below this standard.
+
+The workers, as a class, are being more and more segregated by their
+economic masters; and this process, with its jamming and overcrowding,
+tends not so much toward immorality as unmorality.  Here is an extract
+from a recent meeting of the London County Council, terse and bald, but
+with a wealth of horror to be read between the lines:-
+
+   Mr. Bruce asked the Chairman of the Public Health Committee whether
+   his attention had been called to a number of cases of serious
+   overcrowding in the East End.  In St. Georges-in-the-East a man and
+   his wife and their family of eight occupied one small room.  This
+   family consisted of five daughters, aged twenty, seventeen, eight,
+   four, and an infant; and three sons, aged fifteen, thirteen, and
+   twelve.  In Whitechapel a man and his wife and their three daughters,
+   aged sixteen, eight, and four, and two sons, aged ten and twelve
+   years, occupied a smaller room.  In Bethnal Green a man and his wife,
+   with four sons, aged twenty-three, twenty-one, nineteen, and sixteen,
+   and two daughters, aged fourteen and seven, were also found in one
+   room.  He asked whether it was not the duty of the various local
+   authorities to prevent such serious overcrowding.
+
+But with 900,000 people actually living under illegal conditions, the
+authorities have their hands full.  When the overcrowded folk are ejected
+they stray off into some other hole; and, as they move their belongings
+by night, on hand-barrows (one hand-barrow accommodating the entire
+household goods and the sleeping children), it is next to impossible to
+keep track of them.  If the Public Health Act of 1891 were suddenly and
+completely enforced, 900,000 people would receive notice to clear out of
+their houses and go on to the streets, and 500,000 rooms would have to be
+built before they were all legally housed again.
+
+The mean streets merely look mean from the outside, but inside the walls
+are to be found squalor, misery, and tragedy.  While the following
+tragedy may be revolting to read, it must not be forgotten that the
+existence of it is far more revolting.
+
+In Devonshire Place, Lisson Grove, a short while back died an old woman
+of seventy-five years of age.  At the inquest the coroner's officer
+stated that "all he found in the room was a lot of old rags covered with
+vermin.  He had got himself smothered with the vermin.  The room was in a
+shocking condition, and he had never seen anything like it.  Everything
+was absolutely covered with vermin."
+
+The doctor said: "He found deceased lying across the fender on her back.
+She had one garment and her stockings on.  The body was quite alive with
+vermin, and all the clothes in the room were absolutely grey with
+insects.  Deceased was very badly nourished and was very emaciated.  She
+had extensive sores on her legs, and her stockings were adherent to those
+sores.  The sores were the result of vermin."
+
+A man present at the inquest wrote: "I had the evil fortune to see the
+body of the unfortunate woman as it lay in the mortuary; and even now the
+memory of that gruesome sight makes me shudder.  There she lay in the
+mortuary shell, so starved and emaciated that she was a mere bundle of
+skin and bones.  Her hair, which was matted with filth, was simply a nest
+of vermin.  Over her bony chest leaped and rolled hundreds, thousands,
+myriads of vermin!"
+
+If it is not good for your mother and my mother so to die, then it is not
+good for this woman, whosoever's mother she might be, so to die.
+
+Bishop Wilkinson, who has lived in Zululand, recently said, "No human of
+an African village would allow such a promiscuous mixing of young men and
+women, boys and girls."  He had reference to the children of the
+overcrowded folk, who at five have nothing to learn and much to unlearn
+which they will never unlearn.
+
+It is notorious that here in the Ghetto the houses of the poor are
+greater profit earners than the mansions of the rich.  Not only does the
+poor worker have to live like a beast, but he pays proportionately more
+for it than does the rich man for his spacious comfort.  A class of house-
+sweaters has been made possible by the competition of the poor for
+houses.  There are more people than there is room, and numbers are in the
+workhouse because they cannot find shelter elsewhere.  Not only are
+houses let, but they are sublet, and sub-sublet down to the very rooms.
+
+"A part of a room to let."  This notice was posted a short while ago in a
+window not five minutes' walk from St. James's Hall.  The Rev. Hugh Price
+Hughes is authority for the statement that beds are let on the
+three-relay system--that is, three tenants to a bed, each occupying it
+eight hours, so that it never grows cold; while the floor space
+underneath the bed is likewise let on the three-relay system.  Health
+officers are not at all unused to finding such cases as the following: in
+one room having a cubic capacity of 1000 feet, three adult females in the
+bed, and two adult females under the bed; and in one room of 1650 cubic
+feet, one adult male and two children in the bed, and two adult females
+under the bed.
+
+Here is a typical example of a room on the more respectable two-relay
+system.  It is occupied in the daytime by a young woman employed all
+night in a hotel.  At seven o'clock in the evening she vacates the room,
+and a bricklayer's labourer comes in.  At seven in the morning he
+vacates, and goes to his work, at which time she returns from hers.
+
+The Rev. W. N. Davies, rector of Spitalfields, took a census of some of
+the alleys in his parish.  He says:-
+
+   In one alley there are ten houses--fifty-one rooms, nearly all about 8
+   feet by 9 feet--and 254 people.  In six instances only do 2 people
+   occupy one room; and in others the number varied from 3 to 9.  In
+   another court with six houses and twenty-two rooms were 84
+   people--again 6, 7, 8, and 9 being the number living in one room, in
+   several instances.  In one house with eight rooms are 45 people--one
+   room containing 9 persons, one 8, two 7, and another 6.
+
+This Ghetto crowding is not through inclination, but compulsion.  Nearly
+fifty per cent. of the workers pay from one-fourth to one-half of their
+earnings for rent.  The average rent in the larger part of the East End
+is from four to six shillings per week for one room, while skilled
+mechanics, earning thirty-five shillings per week, are forced to part
+with fifteen shillings of it for two or three pokey little dens, in which
+they strive desperately to obtain some semblance of home life.  And rents
+are going up all the time.  In one street in Stepney the increase in only
+two years has been from thirteen to eighteen shillings; in another street
+from eleven to sixteen shillings; and in another street, from eleven to
+fifteen shillings; while in Whitechapel, two-room houses that recently
+rented for ten shillings are now costing twenty-one shillings.  East,
+west, north, and south the rents are going up.  When land is worth from
+20,000 to 30,000 pounds an acre, some one must pay the landlord.
+
+Mr. W. C. Steadman, in the House of Commons, in a speech concerning his
+constituency in Stepney, related the following:-
+
+   This morning, not a hundred yards from where I am myself living, a
+   widow stopped me.  She has six children to support, and the rent of
+   her house was fourteen shillings per week.  She gets her living by
+   letting the house to lodgers and doing a day's washing or charring.
+   That woman, with tears in her eyes, told me that the landlord had
+   increased the rent from fourteen shillings to eighteen shillings.  What
+   could the woman do?  There is no accommodation in Stepney.  Every
+   place is taken up and overcrowded.
+
+Class supremacy can rest only on class degradation; and when the workers
+are segregated in the Ghetto, they cannot escape the consequent
+degradation.  A short and stunted people is created--a breed strikingly
+differentiated from their masters' breed, a pavement folk, as it were
+lacking stamina and strength.  The men become caricatures of what
+physical men ought to be, and their women and children are pale and
+anaemic, with eyes ringed darkly, who stoop and slouch, and are early
+twisted out of all shapeliness and beauty.
+
+To make matters worse, the men of the Ghetto are the men who are left--a
+deteriorated stock, left to undergo still further deterioration.  For a
+hundred and fifty years, at least, they have been drained of their best.
+The strong men, the men of pluck, initiative, and ambition, have been
+faring forth to the fresher and freer portions of the globe, to make new
+lands and nations.  Those who are lacking, the weak of heart and head and
+hand, as well as the rotten and hopeless, have remained to carry on the
+breed.  And year by year, in turn, the best they breed are taken from
+them.  Wherever a man of vigour and stature manages to grow up, he is
+haled forthwith into the army.  A soldier, as Bernard Shaw has said,
+"ostensibly a heroic and patriotic defender of his country, is really an
+unfortunate man driven by destitution to offer himself as food for powder
+for the sake of regular rations, shelter, and clothing."
+
+This constant selection of the best from the workers has impoverished
+those who are left, a sadly degraded remainder, for the great part,
+which, in the Ghetto, sinks to the deepest depths.  The wine of life has
+been drawn off to spill itself in blood and progeny over the rest of the
+earth.  Those that remain are the lees, and they are segregated and
+steeped in themselves.  They become indecent and bestial.  When they
+kill, they kill with their hands, and then stupidly surrender themselves
+to the executioners.  There is no splendid audacity about their
+transgressions.  They gouge a mate with a dull knife, or beat his head in
+with an iron pot, and then sit down and wait for the police.  Wife-beating
+is the masculine prerogative of matrimony.  They wear remarkable boots of
+brass and iron, and when they have polished off the mother of their
+children with a black eye or so, they knock her down and proceed to
+trample her very much as a Western stallion tramples a rattlesnake.
+
+A woman of the lower Ghetto classes is as much the slave of her husband
+as is the Indian squaw.  And I, for one, were I a woman and had but the
+two choices, should prefer being a squaw.  The men are economically
+dependent on their masters, and the women are economically dependent on
+the men.  The result is, the woman gets the beating the man should give
+his master, and she can do nothing.  There are the kiddies, and he is the
+bread-winner, and she dare not send him to jail and leave herself and
+children to starve.  Evidence to convict can rarely be obtained when such
+cases come into the courts; as a rule, the trampled wife and mother is
+weeping and hysterically beseeching the magistrate to let her husband off
+for the kiddies' sakes.
+
+The wives become screaming harridans or, broken-spirited and doglike,
+lose what little decency and self-respect they have remaining over from
+their maiden days, and all sink together, unheeding, in their degradation
+and dirt.
+
+Sometimes I become afraid of my own generalizations upon the massed
+misery of this Ghetto life, and feel that my impressions are exaggerated,
+that I am too close to the picture and lack perspective.  At such moments
+I find it well to turn to the testimony of other men to prove to myself
+that I am not becoming over-wrought and addle-pated.  Frederick Harrison
+has always struck me as being a level-headed, well-controlled man, and he
+says:-
+
+   To me, at least, it would be enough to condemn modern society as
+   hardly an advance on slavery or serfdom, if the permanent condition of
+   industry were to be that which we behold, that ninety per cent. of the
+   actual producers of wealth have no home that they can call their own
+   beyond the end of the week; have no bit of soil, or so much as a room
+   that belongs to them; have nothing of value of any kind, except as
+   much old furniture as will go into a cart; have the precarious chance
+   of weekly wages, which barely suffice to keep them in health; are
+   housed, for the most part, in places that no man thinks fit for his
+   horse; are separated by so narrow a margin from destitution that a
+   month of bad trade, sickness, or unexpected loss brings them face to
+   face with hunger and pauperism . . . But below this normal state of
+   the average workman in town and country, there is found the great band
+   of destitute outcasts--the camp followers of the army of industry--at
+   least one-tenth the whole proletarian population, whose normal
+   condition is one of sickening wretchedness.  If this is to be the
+   permanent arrangement of modern society, civilization must be held to
+   bring a curse on the great majority of mankind.
+
+Ninety per cent.!  The figures are appalling, yet Mr. Stopford Brooke,
+after drawing a frightful London picture, finds himself compelled to
+multiply it by half a million.  Here it is:-
+
+   I often used to meet, when I was curate at Kensington, families
+   drifting into London along the Hammersmith Road.  One day there came
+   along a labourer and his wife, his son and two daughters.  Their
+   family had lived for a long time on an estate in the country, and
+   managed, with the help of the common-land and their labour, to get on.
+   But the time came when the common was encroached upon, and their
+   labour was not needed on the estate, and they were quietly turned out
+   of their cottage.  Where should they go?  Of course to London, where
+   work was thought to be plentiful.  They had a little savings, and they
+   thought they could get two decent rooms to live in.  But the
+   inexorable land question met them in London.  They tried the decent
+   courts for lodgings, and found that two rooms would cost ten shillings
+   a week.  Food was dear and bad, water was bad, and in a short time
+   their health suffered.  Work was hard to get, and its wage was so low
+   that they were soon in debt.  They became more ill and more despairing
+   with the poisonous surroundings, the darkness, and the long hours of
+   work; and they were driven forth to seek a cheaper lodging.  They
+   found it in a court I knew well--a hotbed of crime and nameless
+   horrors.  In this they got a single room at a cruel rent, and work was
+   more difficult for them to get now, as they came from a place of such
+   bad repute, and they fell into the hands of those who sweat the last
+   drop out of man and woman and child, for wages which are the food only
+   of despair.  And the darkness and the dirt, the bad food and the
+   sickness, and the want of water was worse than before; and the crowd
+   and the companionship of the court robbed them of the last shreds of
+   self-respect.  The drink demon seized upon them.  Of course there was
+   a public-house at both ends of the court.  There they fled, one and
+   all, for shelter, and warmth, and society, and forgetfulness.  And
+   they came out in deeper debt, with inflamed senses and burning brains,
+   and an unsatisfied craving for drink they would do anything to
+   satiate.  And in a few months the father was in prison, the wife
+   dying, the son a criminal, and the daughters on the street.  _Multiply
+   this by half a million, and you will be beneath the truth_.
+
+No more dreary spectacle can be found on this earth than the whole of the
+"awful East," with its Whitechapel, Hoxton, Spitalfields, Bethnal Green,
+and Wapping to the East India Docks.  The colour of life is grey and
+drab.  Everything is helpless, hopeless, unrelieved, and dirty.  Bath
+tubs are a thing totally unknown, as mythical as the ambrosia of the
+gods.  The people themselves are dirty, while any attempt at cleanliness
+becomes howling farce, when it is not pitiful and tragic.  Strange,
+vagrant odours come drifting along the greasy wind, and the rain, when it
+falls, is more like grease than water from heaven.  The very cobblestones
+are scummed with grease.
+
+Here lives a population as dull and unimaginative as its long grey miles
+of dingy brick.  Religion has virtually passed it by, and a gross and
+stupid materialism reigns, fatal alike to the things of the spirit and
+the finer instincts of life.
+
+It used to be the proud boast that every Englishman's home was his
+castle.  But to-day it is an anachronism.  The Ghetto folk have no homes.
+They do not know the significance and the sacredness of home life.  Even
+the municipal dwellings, where live the better-class workers, are
+overcrowded barracks.  They have no home life.  The very language proves
+it.  The father returning from work asks his child in the street where
+her mother is; and back the answer comes, "In the buildings."
+
+A new race has sprung up, a street people.  They pass their lives at work
+and in the streets.  They have dens and lairs into which to crawl for
+sleeping purposes, and that is all.  One cannot travesty the word by
+calling such dens and lairs "homes."  The traditional silent and reserved
+Englishman has passed away.  The pavement folk are noisy, voluble, high-
+strung, excitable--when they are yet young.  As they grow older they
+become steeped and stupefied in beer.  When they have nothing else to do,
+they ruminate as a cow ruminates.  They are to be met with everywhere,
+standing on curbs and corners, and staring into vacancy.  Watch one of
+them.  He will stand there, motionless, for hours, and when you go away
+you will leave him still staring into vacancy.  It is most absorbing.  He
+has no money for beer, and his lair is only for sleeping purposes, so
+what else remains for him to do?  He has already solved the mysteries of
+girl's love, and wife's love, and child's love, and found them delusions
+and shams, vain and fleeting as dew-drops, quick-vanishing before the
+ferocious facts of life.
+
+As I say, the young are high-strung, nervous, excitable; the middle-aged
+are empty-headed, stolid, and stupid.  It is absurd to think for an
+instant that they can compete with the workers of the New World.
+Brutalised, degraded, and dull, the Ghetto folk will be unable to render
+efficient service to England in the world struggle for industrial
+supremacy which economists declare has already begun.  Neither as workers
+nor as soldiers can they come up to the mark when England, in her need,
+calls upon them, her forgotten ones; and if England be flung out of the
+world's industrial orbit, they will perish like flies at the end of
+summer.  Or, with England critically situated, and with them made
+desperate as wild beasts are made desperate, they may become a menace and
+go "swelling" down to the West End to return the "slumming" the West End
+has done in the East.  In which case, before rapid-fire guns and the
+modern machinery of warfare, they will perish the more swiftly and
+easily.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX--COFFEE-HOUSES AND DOSS-HOUSES
+
+
+Another phrase gone glimmering, shorn of romance and tradition and all
+that goes to make phrases worth keeping!  For me, henceforth, "coffee-
+house" will possess anything but an agreeable connotation.  Over on the
+other side of the world, the mere mention of the word was sufficient to
+conjure up whole crowds of its historic frequenters, and to send trooping
+through my imagination endless groups of wits and dandies, pamphleteers
+and bravos, and bohemians of Grub Street.
+
+But here, on this side of the world, alas and alack, the very name is a
+misnomer.  Coffee-house: a place where people drink coffee.  Not at all.
+You cannot obtain coffee in such a place for love or money.  True, you
+may call for coffee, and you will have brought you something in a cup
+purporting to be coffee, and you will taste it and be disillusioned, for
+coffee it certainly is not.
+
+And what is true of the coffee is true of the coffee-house.  Working-men,
+in the main, frequent these places, and greasy, dirty places they are,
+without one thing about them to cherish decency in a man or put
+self-respect into him.  Table-cloths and napkins are unknown.  A man eats
+in the midst of the debris left by his predecessor, and dribbles his own
+scraps about him and on the floor.  In rush times, in such places, I have
+positively waded through the muck and mess that covered the floor, and I
+have managed to eat because I was abominably hungry and capable of eating
+anything.
+
+This seems to be the normal condition of the working-man, from the zest
+with which he addresses himself to the board.  Eating is a necessity, and
+there are no frills about it.  He brings in with him a primitive
+voraciousness, and, I am confident, carries away with him a fairly
+healthy appetite.  When you see such a man, on his way to work in the
+morning, order a pint of tea, which is no more tea than it is ambrosia,
+pull a hunk of dry bread from his pocket, and wash the one down with the
+other, depend upon it, that man has not the right sort of stuff in his
+belly, nor enough of the wrong sort of stuff, to fit him for big day's
+work.  And further, depend upon it, he and a thousand of his kind will
+not turn out the quantity or quality of work that a thousand men will who
+have eaten heartily of meat and potatoes, and drunk coffee that is
+coffee.
+
+As a vagrant in the "Hobo" of a California jail, I have been served
+better food and drink than the London workman receives in his
+coffee-houses; while as an American labourer I have eaten a breakfast for
+twelvepence such as the British labourer would not dream of eating.  Of
+course, he will pay only three or four pence for his; which is, however,
+as much as I paid, for I would be earning six shillings to his two or two
+and a half.  On the other hand, though, and in return, I would turn out
+an amount of work in the course of the day that would put to shame the
+amount he turned out.  So there are two sides to it.  The man with the
+high standard of living will always do more work and better than the man
+with the low standard of living.
+
+There is a comparison which sailormen make between the English and
+American merchant services.  In an English ship, they say, it is poor
+grub, poor pay, and easy work; in an American ship, good grub, good pay,
+and hard work.  And this is applicable to the working populations of both
+countries.  The ocean greyhounds have to pay for speed and steam, and so
+does the workman.  But if the workman is not able to pay for it, he will
+not have the speed and steam, that is all.  The proof of it is when the
+English workman comes to America.  He will lay more bricks in New York
+than he will in London, still more bricks in St. Louis, and still more
+bricks when he gets to San Francisco. {3}  His standard of living has
+been rising all the time.
+
+Early in the morning, along the streets frequented by workmen on the way
+to work, many women sit on the sidewalk with sacks of bread beside them.
+No end of workmen purchase these, and eat them as they walk along.  They
+do not even wash the dry bread down with the tea to be obtained for a
+penny in the coffee-houses.  It is incontestable that a man is not fit to
+begin his day's work on a meal like that; and it is equally incontestable
+that the loss will fall upon his employer and upon the nation.  For some
+time, now, statesmen have been crying, "Wake up, England!"  It would show
+more hard-headed common sense if they changed the tune to "Feed up,
+England!"
+
+Not only is the worker poorly fed, but he is filthily fed.  I have stood
+outside a butcher-shop and watched a horde of speculative housewives
+turning over the trimmings and scraps and shreds of beef and mutton--dog-
+meat in the States.  I would not vouch for the clean fingers of these
+housewives, no more than I would vouch for the cleanliness of the single
+rooms in which many of them and their families lived; yet they raked, and
+pawed, and scraped the mess about in their anxiety to get the worth of
+their coppers.  I kept my eye on one particularly offensive-looking bit
+of meat, and followed it through the clutches of over twenty women, till
+it fell to the lot of a timid-appearing little woman whom the butcher
+bluffed into taking it.  All day long this heap of scraps was added to
+and taken away from, the dust and dirt of the street falling upon it,
+flies settling on it, and the dirty fingers turning it over and over.
+
+The costers wheel loads of specked and decaying fruit around in the
+barrows all day, and very often store it in their one living and sleeping
+room for the night.  There it is exposed to the sickness and disease, the
+effluvia and vile exhalations of overcrowded and rotten life, and next
+day it is carted about again to be sold.
+
+The poor worker of the East End never knows what it is to eat good,
+wholesome meat or fruit--in fact, he rarely eats meat or fruit at all;
+while the skilled workman has nothing to boast of in the way of what he
+eats.  Judging from the coffee-houses, which is a fair criterion, they
+never know in all their lives what tea, coffee, or cocoa tastes like.  The
+slops and water-witcheries of the coffee-houses, varying only in
+sloppiness and witchery, never even approximate or suggest what you and I
+are accustomed to drink as tea and coffee.
+
+A little incident comes to me, connected with a coffee-house not far from
+Jubilee Street on the Mile End Road.
+
+"Cawn yer let me 'ave somethin' for this, daughter?  Anythin', Hi don't
+mind.  Hi 'aven't 'ad a bite the blessed dy, an' Hi'm that fynt . . . "
+
+She was an old woman, clad in decent black rags, and in her hand she held
+a penny.  The one she had addressed as "daughter" was a careworn woman of
+forty, proprietress and waitress of the house.
+
+I waited, possibly as anxiously as the old woman, to see how the appeal
+would be received.  It was four in the afternoon, and she looked faint
+and sick.  The woman hesitated an instant, then brought a large plate of
+"stewed lamb and young peas."  I was eating a plate of it myself, and it
+is my judgment that the lamb was mutton and that the peas might have been
+younger without being youthful.  However, the point is, the dish was sold
+at sixpence, and the proprietress gave it for a penny, demonstrating anew
+the old truth that the poor are the most charitable.
+
+The old woman, profuse in her gratitude, took a seat on the other side of
+the narrow table and ravenously attacked the smoking stew.  We ate
+steadily and silently, the pair of us, when suddenly, explosively and
+most gleefully, she cried out to me,--
+
+"Hi sold a box o' matches!  Yus," she confirmed, if anything with greater
+and more explosive glee.  "Hi sold a box o' matches!  That's 'ow Hi got
+the penny."
+
+"You must be getting along in years," I suggested.
+
+"Seventy-four yesterday," she replied, and returned with gusto to her
+plate.
+
+"Blimey, I'd like to do something for the old girl, that I would, but
+this is the first I've 'ad to-dy," the young fellow alongside volunteered
+to me.  "An' I only 'ave this because I 'appened to make an odd shilling
+washin' out, Lord lumme! I don't know 'ow many pots."
+
+"No work at my own tryde for six weeks," he said further, in reply to my
+questions; "nothin' but odd jobs a blessed long wy between."
+
+* * * * *
+
+One meets with all sorts of adventures in coffee-house, and I shall not
+soon forget a Cockney Amazon in a place near Trafalgar Square, to whom I
+tendered a sovereign when paying my score.  (By the way, one is supposed
+to pay before he begins to eat, and if he be poorly dressed he is
+compelled to pay before he eats).
+
+The girl bit the gold piece between her teeth, rang it on the counter,
+and then looked me and my rags witheringly up and down.
+
+"Where'd you find it?" she at length demanded.
+
+"Some mug left it on the table when he went out, eh, don't you think?" I
+retorted.
+
+"Wot's yer gyme?" she queried, looking me calmly in the eyes.
+
+"I makes 'em," quoth I.
+
+She sniffed superciliously and gave me the change in small silver, and I
+had my revenge by biting and ringing every piece of it.
+
+"I'll give you a ha'penny for another lump of sugar in the tea," I said.
+
+"I'll see you in 'ell first," came the retort courteous.  Also, she
+amplified the retort courteous in divers vivid and unprintable ways.
+
+I never had much talent for repartee, but she knocked silly what little I
+had, and I gulped down my tea a beaten man, while she gloated after me
+even as I passed out to the street.
+
+While 300,000 people of London live in one-room tenements, and 900,000
+are illegally and viciously housed, 38,000 more are registered as living
+in common lodging-houses--known in the vernacular as "doss-houses."  There
+are many kinds of doss-houses, but in one thing they are all alike, from
+the filthy little ones to the monster big ones paying five per cent. and
+blatantly lauded by smug middle-class men who know but one thing about
+them, and that one thing is their uninhabitableness.  By this I do not
+mean that the roofs leak or the walls are draughty; but what I do mean is
+that life in them is degrading and unwholesome.
+
+"The poor man's hotel," they are often called, but the phrase is
+caricature.  Not to possess a room to one's self, in which sometimes to
+sit alone; to be forced out of bed willy-nilly, the first thing in the
+morning; to engage and pay anew for a bed each night; and never to have
+any privacy, surely is a mode of existence quite different from that of
+hotel life.
+
+This must not be considered a sweeping condemnation of the big private
+and municipal lodging-houses and working-men's homes.  Far from it.  They
+have remedied many of the atrocities attendant upon the irresponsible
+small doss-houses, and they give the workman more for his money than he
+ever received before; but that does not make them as habitable or
+wholesome as the dwelling-place of a man should be who does his work in
+the world.
+
+The little private doss-houses, as a rule, are unmitigated horrors.  I
+have slept in them, and I know; but let me pass them by and confine
+myself to the bigger and better ones.  Not far from Middlesex Street,
+Whitechapel, I entered such a house, a place inhabited almost entirely by
+working men.  The entrance was by way of a flight of steps descending
+from the sidewalk to what was properly the cellar of the building.  Here
+were two large and gloomily lighted rooms, in which men cooked and ate.  I
+had intended to do some cooking myself, but the smell of the place stole
+away my appetite, or, rather, wrested it from me; so I contented myself
+with watching other men cook and eat.
+
+One workman, home from work, sat down opposite me at the rough wooden
+table, and began his meal.  A handful of salt on the not over-clean table
+constituted his butter.  Into it he dipped his bread, mouthful by
+mouthful, and washed it down with tea from a big mug.  A piece of fish
+completed his bill of fare.  He ate silently, looking neither to right
+nor left nor across at me.  Here and there, at the various tables, other
+men were eating, just as silently.  In the whole room there was hardly a
+note of conversation.  A feeling of gloom pervaded the ill-lighted place.
+Many of them sat and brooded over the crumbs of their repast, and made me
+wonder, as Childe Roland wondered, what evil they had done that they
+should be punished so.
+
+From the kitchen came the sounds of more genial life, and I ventured into
+the range where the men were cooking.  But the smell I had noticed on
+entering was stronger here, and a rising nausea drove me into the street
+for fresh air.
+
+On my return I paid fivepence for a "cabin," took my receipt for the same
+in the form of a huge brass check, and went upstairs to the smoking-room.
+Here, a couple of small billiard tables and several checkerboards were
+being used by young working-men, who waited in relays for their turn at
+the games, while many men were sitting around, smoking, reading, and
+mending their clothes.  The young men were hilarious, the old men were
+gloomy.  In fact, there were two types of men, the cheerful and the
+sodden or blue, and age seemed to determine the classification.
+
+But no more than the two cellar rooms did this room convey the remotest
+suggestion of home.  Certainly there could be nothing home-like about it
+to you and me, who know what home really is.  On the walls were the most
+preposterous and insulting notices regulating the conduct of the guests,
+and at ten o'clock the lights were put out, and nothing remained but bed.
+This was gained by descending again to the cellar, by surrendering the
+brass check to a burly doorkeeper, and by climbing a long flight of
+stairs into the upper regions.  I went to the top of the building and
+down again, passing several floors filled with sleeping men.  The
+"cabins" were the best accommodation, each cabin allowing space for a
+tiny bed and room alongside of it in which to undress.  The bedding was
+clean, and with neither it nor the bed do I find any fault.  But there
+was no privacy about it, no being alone.
+
+To get an adequate idea of a floor filled with cabins, you have merely to
+magnify a layer of the pasteboard pigeon-holes of an egg-crate till each
+pigeon-hole is seven feet in height and otherwise properly dimensioned,
+then place the magnified layer on the floor of a large, barnlike room,
+and there you have it.  There are no ceilings to the pigeon-holes, the
+walls are thin, and the snores from all the sleepers and every move and
+turn of your nearer neighbours come plainly to your ears.  And this cabin
+is yours only for a little while.  In the morning out you go.  You cannot
+put your trunk in it, or come and go when you like, or lock the door
+behind you, or anything of the sort.  In fact, there is no door at all,
+only a doorway.  If you care to remain a guest in this poor man's hotel,
+you must put up with all this, and with prison regulations which impress
+upon you constantly that you are nobody, with little soul of your own and
+less to say about it.
+
+Now I contend that the least a man who does his day's work should have is
+a room to himself, where he can lock the door and be safe in his
+possessions; where he can sit down and read by a window or look out;
+where he can come and go whenever he wishes; where he can accumulate a
+few personal belongings other than those he carries about with him on his
+back and in his pockets; where he can hang up pictures of his mother,
+sister, sweet-heart, ballet dancers, or bulldogs, as his heart listeth--in
+short, one place of his own on the earth of which he can say: "This is
+mine, my castle; the world stops at the threshold; here am I lord and
+master."  He will be a better citizen, this man; and he will do a better
+day's work.
+
+I stood on one floor of the poor man's hotel and listened.  I went from
+bed to bed and looked at the sleepers.  They were young men, from twenty
+to forty, most of them.  Old men cannot afford the working-man's home.
+They go to the workhouse.  But I looked at the young men, scores of them,
+and they were not bad-looking fellows.  Their faces were made for women's
+kisses, their necks for women's arms.  They were lovable, as men are
+lovable.  They were capable of love.  A woman's touch redeems and
+softens, and they needed such redemption and softening instead of each
+day growing harsh and harsher.  And I wondered where these women were,
+and heard a "harlot's ginny laugh."  Leman Street, Waterloo Road,
+Piccadilly, The Strand, answered me, and I knew where they were.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI--THE PRECARIOUSNESS OF LIFE
+
+
+I was talking with a very vindictive man.  In his opinion, his wife had
+wronged him and the law had wronged him.  The merits and morals of the
+case are immaterial.  The meat of the matter is that she had obtained a
+separation, and he was compelled to pay ten shillings each week for the
+support of her and the five children.  "But look you," said he to me,
+"wot'll 'appen to 'er if I don't py up the ten shillings?  S'posin', now,
+just s'posin' a accident 'appens to me, so I cawn't work.  S'posin' I get
+a rupture, or the rheumatics, or the cholera.  Wot's she goin' to do, eh?
+Wot's she goin' to do?"
+
+He shook his head sadly.  "No 'ope for 'er.  The best she cawn do is the
+work'ouse, an' that's 'ell.  An' if she don't go to the work'ouse, it'll
+be a worse 'ell.  Come along 'ith me an' I'll show you women sleepin' in
+a passage, a dozen of 'em.  An' I'll show you worse, wot she'll come to
+if anythin' 'appens to me and the ten shillings."
+
+The certitude of this man's forecast is worthy of consideration.  He knew
+conditions sufficiently to know the precariousness of his wife's grasp on
+food and shelter.  For her game was up when his working capacity was
+impaired or destroyed.  And when this state of affairs is looked at in
+its larger aspect, the same will be found true of hundreds of thousands
+and even millions of men and women living amicably together and
+co-operating in the pursuit of food and shelter.
+
+The figures are appalling: 1,800,000 people in London live on the poverty
+line and below it, and 1,000,000 live with one week's wages between them
+and pauperism.  In all England and Wales, eighteen per cent. of the whole
+population are driven to the parish for relief, and in London, according
+to the statistics of the London County Council, twenty-one per cent. of
+the whole population are driven to the parish for relief.  Between being
+driven to the parish for relief and being an out-and-out pauper there is
+a great difference, yet London supports 123,000 paupers, quite a city of
+folk in themselves.  One in every four in London dies on public charity,
+while 939 out of every 1000 in the United Kingdom die in poverty;
+8,000,000 simply struggle on the ragged edge of starvation, and
+20,000,000 more are not comfortable in the simple and clean sense of the
+word.
+
+It is interesting to go more into detail concerning the London people who
+die on charity.
+
+In 1886, and up to 1893, the percentage of pauperism to population was
+less in London than in all England; but since 1893, and for every
+succeeding year, the percentage of pauperism to population has been
+greater in London than in all England.  Yet, from the Registrar-General's
+Report for 1886, the following figures are taken:-
+
+Out of 81,951 deaths in London (1884):-
+
+In workhouses            9,909
+In hospitals             6,559
+In lunatic asylums         278
+Total in public refuges 16,746
+
+Commenting on these figures, a Fabian writer says: "Considering that
+comparatively few of these are children, it is probable that one in every
+three London adults will be driven into one of these refuges to die, and
+the proportion in the case of the manual labour class must of course be
+still larger."
+
+These figures serve somewhat to indicate the proximity of the average
+worker to pauperism.  Various things make pauperism.  An advertisement,
+for instance, such as this, appearing in yesterday morning's paper:-
+
+"Clerk wanted, with knowledge of shorthand, typewriting, and invoicing:
+wages ten shillings ($2.50) a week.  Apply by letter," &c.
+
+And in to-day's paper I read of a clerk, thirty-five years of age and an
+inmate of a London workhouse, brought before a magistrate for
+non-performance of task.  He claimed that he had done his various tasks
+since he had been an inmate; but when the master set him to breaking
+stones, his hands blistered, and he could not finish the task.  He had
+never been used to an implement heavier than a pen, he said.  The
+magistrate sentenced him and his blistered hands to seven days' hard
+labour.
+
+Old age, of course, makes pauperism.  And then there is the accident, the
+thing happening, the death or disablement of the husband, father, and
+bread-winner.  Here is a man, with a wife and three children, living on
+the ticklish security of twenty shillings per week--and there are
+hundreds of thousands of such families in London.  Perforce, to even half
+exist, they must live up to the last penny of it, so that a week's wages
+(one pound) is all that stands between this family and pauperism or
+starvation.  The thing happens, the father is struck down, and what then?
+A mother with three children can do little or nothing.  Either she must
+hand her children over to society as juvenile paupers, in order to be
+free to do something adequate for herself, or she must go to the sweat-
+shops for work which she can perform in the vile den possible to her
+reduced income.  But with the sweat-shops, married women who eke out
+their husband's earnings, and single women who have but themselves
+miserably to support, determine the scale of wages.  And this scale of
+wages, so determined, is so low that the mother and her three children
+can live only in positive beastliness and semi-starvation, till decay and
+death end their suffering.
+
+To show that this mother, with her three children to support, cannot
+compete in the sweating industries, I instance from the current
+newspapers the two following cases:-
+
+A father indignantly writes that his daughter and a girl companion
+receive 8.5d. per gross for making boxes.  They made each day four gross.
+Their expenses were 8d. for car fare, 2d. for stamps, 2.5d. for glue, and
+1d. for string, so that all they earned between them was 1s. 9d., or a
+daily wage each of 10.5d.
+
+In the second ewe, before the Luton Guardians a few days ago, an old
+woman of seventy-two appeared, asking for relief.  "She was a straw-hat
+maker, but had been compelled to give up the work owing to the price she
+obtained for them--namely, 2.25d. each.  For that price she had to
+provide plait trimmings and make and finish the hats."
+
+Yet this mother and her three children we are considering have done no
+wrong that they should be so punished.  They have not sinned.  The thing
+happened, that is all; the husband, father and bread-winner, was struck
+down.  There is no guarding against it.  It is fortuitous.  A family
+stands so many chances of escaping the bottom of the Abyss, and so many
+chances of falling plump down to it.  The chance is reducible to cold,
+pitiless figures, and a few of these figures will not be out of place.
+
+Sir A. Forwood calculates that--
+
+1 of every 1400 workmen is killed annually.
+1 of every 2500 workmen is totally disabled.
+1 of every 300 workmen is permanently partially disabled.
+1 of every 8 workmen is temporarily disabled 3 or 4 weeks.
+
+But these are only the accidents of industry.  The high mortality of the
+people who live in the Ghetto plays a terrible part.  The average age at
+death among the people of the West End is fifty-five years; the average
+age at death among the people of the East End is thirty years.  That is
+to say, the person in the West End has twice the chance for life that the
+person has in the East End.  Talk of war!  The mortality in South Africa
+and the Philippines fades away to insignificance.  Here, in the heart of
+peace, is where the blood is being shed; and here not even the civilised
+rules of warfare obtain, for the women and children and babes in the arms
+are killed just as ferociously as the men are killed.  War!  In England,
+every year, 500,000 men, women, and children, engaged in the various
+industries, are killed and disabled, or are injured to disablement by
+disease.
+
+In the West End eighteen per cent. of the children die before five years
+of age; in the East End fifty-five per cent. of the children die before
+five years of age.  And there are streets in London where out of every
+one hundred children born in a year, fifty die during the next year; and
+of the fifty that remain, twenty-five die before they are five years old.
+Slaughter!  Herod did not do quite so badly.
+
+That industry causes greater havoc with human life than battle does no
+better substantiation can be given than the following extract from a
+recent report of the Liverpool Medical Officer, which is not applicable
+to Liverpool alone:-
+
+   In many instances little if any sunlight could get to the courts, and
+   the atmosphere within the dwellings was always foul, owing largely to
+   the saturated condition of the walls and ceilings, which for so many
+   years had absorbed the exhalations of the occupants into their porous
+   material.  Singular testimony to the absence of sunlight in these
+   courts was furnished by the action of the Parks and Gardens Committee,
+   who desired to brighten the homes of the poorest class by gifts of
+   growing flowers and window-boxes; but these gifts could not be made in
+   courts such as these, _as flowers and plants were susceptible to the
+   unwholesome surroundings, and would not live_.
+
+Mr. George Haw has compiled the following table on the three St. George's
+parishes (London parishes):-
+
+                   Percentage of
+                   Population      Death-rate
+                   Overcrowded      per 1000
+St. George's West  10                 13.2
+St. George's South 35                 23.7
+St. George's East  40                 26.4
+
+Then there are the "dangerous trades," in which countless workers are
+employed.  Their hold on life is indeed precarious--far, far more
+precarious than the hold of the twentieth-century soldier on life.  In
+the linen trade, in the preparation of the flax, wet feet and wet clothes
+cause an unusual amount of bronchitis, pneumonia, and severe rheumatism;
+while in the carding and spinning departments the fine dust produces lung
+disease in the majority of cases, and the woman who starts carding at
+seventeen or eighteen begins to break up and go to pieces at thirty.  The
+chemical labourers, picked from the strongest and most splendidly-built
+men to be found, live, on an average, less than forty-eight years.
+
+Says Dr. Arlidge, of the potter's trade: "Potter's dust does not kill
+suddenly, but settles, year after year, a little more firmly into the
+lungs, until at length a case of plaster is formed.  Breathing becomes
+more and more difficult and depressed, and finally ceases."
+
+Steel dust, stone dust, clay dust, alkali dust, fluff dust, fibre
+dust--all these things kill, and they are more deadly than machine-guns
+and pom-poms.  Worst of all is the lead dust in the white-lead trades.
+Here is a description of the typical dissolution of a young, healthy,
+well-developed girl who goes to work in a white-lead factory:-
+
+   Here, after a varying degree of exposure, she becomes anaemic.  It may
+   be that her gums show a very faint blue line, or perchance her teeth
+   and gums are perfectly sound, and no blue line is discernible.
+   Coincidently with the anaemia she has been getting thinner, but so
+   gradually as scarcely to impress itself upon her or her friends.
+   Sickness, however, ensues, and headaches, growing in intensity, are
+   developed.  These are frequently attended by obscuration of vision or
+   temporary blindness.  Such a girl passes into what appears to her
+   friends and medical adviser as ordinary hysteria.  This gradually
+   deepens without warning, until she is suddenly seized with a
+   convulsion, beginning in one half of the face, then involving the arm,
+   next the leg of the same side of the body, until the convulsion,
+   violent and purely epileptic form in character, becomes universal.
+   This is attended by loss of consciousness, out of which she passes
+   into a series of convulsions, gradually increasing in severity, in one
+   of which she dies--or consciousness, partial or perfect, is regained,
+   either, it may be, for a few minutes, a few hours, or days, during
+   which violent headache is complained of, or she is delirious and
+   excited, as in acute mania, or dull and sullen as in melancholia, and
+   requires to be roused, when she is found wandering, and her speech is
+   somewhat imperfect.  Without further warning, save that the pulse,
+   which has become soft, with nearly the normal number of beats, all at
+   once becomes low and hard; she is suddenly seized with another
+   convulsion, in which she dies, or passes into a state of coma from
+   which she never rallies.  In another case the convulsions will
+   gradually subside, the headache disappears and the patient recovers,
+   only to find that she has completely lost her eyesight, a loss that
+   may be temporary or permanent.
+
+And here are a few specific cases of white-lead poisoning:-
+
+   Charlotte Rafferty, a fine, well-grown young woman with a splendid
+   constitution--who had never had a day's illness in her life--became a
+   white-lead worker.  Convulsions seized her at the foot of the ladder
+   in the works.  Dr. Oliver examined her, found the blue line along her
+   gums, which shows that the system is under the influence of the lead.
+   He knew that the convulsions would shortly return.  They did so, and
+   she died.
+
+   Mary Ann Toler--a girl of seventeen, who had never had a fit in her
+   life--three times became ill, and had to leave off work in the
+   factory.  Before she was nineteen she showed symptoms of lead
+   poisoning--had fits, frothed at the mouth, and died.
+
+   Mary A., an unusually vigorous woman, was able to work in the lead
+   factory for _twenty years_, having colic once only during that time.
+   Her eight children all died in early infancy from convulsions.  One
+   morning, whilst brushing her hair, this woman suddenly lost all power
+   in both her wrists.
+
+   Eliza H., aged twenty-five, _after five months_ at lead works, was
+   seized with colic.  She entered another factory (after being refused
+   by the first one) and worked on uninterruptedly for two years.  Then
+   the former symptoms returned, she was seized with convulsions, and
+   died in two days of acute lead poisoning.
+
+Mr. Vaughan Nash, speaking of the unborn generation, says: "The children
+of the white-lead worker enter the world, as a rule, only to die from the
+convulsions of lead poisoning--they are either born prematurely, or die
+within the first year."
+
+And, finally, let me instance the case of Harriet A. Walker, a young girl
+of seventeen, killed while leading a forlorn hope on the industrial
+battlefield.  She was employed as an enamelled ware brusher, wherein lead
+poisoning is encountered.  Her father and brother were both out of
+employment.  She concealed her illness, walked six miles a day to and
+from work, earned her seven or eight shillings per week, and died, at
+seventeen.
+
+Depression in trade also plays an important part in hurling the workers
+into the Abyss.  With a week's wages between a family and pauperism, a
+month's enforced idleness means hardship and misery almost indescribable,
+and from the ravages of which the victims do not always recover when work
+is to be had again.  Just now the daily papers contain the report of a
+meeting of the Carlisle branch of the Dockers' Union, wherein it is
+stated that many of the men, for months past, have not averaged a weekly
+income of more than from four to five shillings.  The stagnated state of
+the shipping industry in the port of London is held accountable for this
+condition of affairs.
+
+To the young working-man or working-woman, or married couple, there is no
+assurance of happy or healthy middle life, nor of solvent old age.  Work
+as they will, they cannot make their future secure.  It is all a matter
+of chance.  Everything depends upon the thing happening, the thing with
+which they have nothing to do.  Precaution cannot fend it off, nor can
+wiles evade it.  If they remain on the industrial battlefield they must
+face it and take their chance against heavy odds.  Of course, if they are
+favourably made and are not tied by kinship duties, they may run away
+from the industrial battlefield.  In which event the safest thing the man
+can do is to join the army; and for the woman, possibly, to become a Red
+Cross nurse or go into a nunnery.  In either case they must forego home
+and children and all that makes life worth living and old age other than
+a nightmare.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII--SUICIDE
+
+
+With life so precarious, and opportunity for the happiness of life so
+remote, it is inevitable that life shall be cheap and suicide common.  So
+common is it, that one cannot pick up a daily paper without running
+across it; while an attempt-at-suicide case in a police court excites no
+more interest than an ordinary "drunk," and is handled with the same
+rapidity and unconcern.
+
+I remember such a case in the Thames Police Court.  I pride myself that I
+have good eyes and ears, and a fair working knowledge of men and things;
+but I confess, as I stood in that court-room, that I was half bewildered
+by the amazing despatch with which drunks, disorderlies, vagrants,
+brawlers, wife-beaters, thieves, fences, gamblers, and women of the
+street went through the machine of justice.  The dock stood in the centre
+of the court (where the light is best), and into it and out again stepped
+men, women, and children, in a stream as steady as the stream of
+sentences which fell from the magistrate's lips.
+
+I was still pondering over a consumptive "fence" who had pleaded
+inability to work and necessity for supporting wife and children, and who
+had received a year at hard labour, when a young boy of about twenty
+appeared in the dock.  "Alfred Freeman," I caught his name, but failed to
+catch the charge.  A stout and motherly-looking woman bobbed up in the
+witness-box and began her testimony.  Wife of the Britannia lock-keeper,
+I learned she was.  Time, night; a splash; she ran to the lock and found
+the prisoner in the water.
+
+I flashed my gaze from her to him.  So that was the charge, self-murder.
+He stood there dazed and unheeding, his bonny brown hair rumpled down his
+forehead, his face haggard and careworn and boyish still.
+
+"Yes, sir," the lock-keeper's wife was saying.  "As fast as I pulled to
+get 'im out, 'e crawled back.  Then I called for 'elp, and some workmen
+'appened along, and we got 'im out and turned 'im over to the constable."
+
+The magistrate complimented the woman on her muscular powers, and the
+court-room laughed; but all I could see was a boy on the threshold of
+life, passionately crawling to muddy death, and there was no laughter in
+it.
+
+A man was now in the witness-box, testifying to the boy's good character
+and giving extenuating evidence.  He was the boy's foreman, or had been.
+Alfred was a good boy, but he had had lots of trouble at home, money
+matters.  And then his mother was sick.  He was given to worrying, and he
+worried over it till he laid himself out and wasn't fit for work.  He
+(the foreman), for the sake of his own reputation, the boy's work being
+bad, had been forced to ask him to resign.
+
+"Anything to say?" the magistrate demanded abruptly.
+
+The boy in the dock mumbled something indistinctly.  He was still dazed.
+
+"What does he say, constable?" the magistrate asked impatiently.
+
+The stalwart man in blue bent his ear to the prisoner's lips, and then
+replied loudly, "He says he's very sorry, your Worship."
+
+"Remanded," said his Worship; and the next case was under way, the first
+witness already engaged in taking the oath.  The boy, dazed and
+unheeding, passed out with the jailer.  That was all, five minutes from
+start to finish; and two hulking brutes in the dock were trying
+strenuously to shift the responsibility of the possession of a stolen
+fishing-pole, worth probably ten cents.
+
+The chief trouble with these poor folk is that they do not know how to
+commit suicide, and usually have to make two or three attempts before
+they succeed.  This, very naturally, is a horrid nuisance to the
+constables and magistrates, and gives them no end of trouble.  Sometimes,
+however, the magistrates are frankly outspoken about the matter, and
+censure the prisoners for the slackness of their attempts.  For instance
+Mr. R. S---, chairman of the S--- B--- magistrates, in the case the other
+day of Ann Wood, who tried to make away with herself in the canal: "If
+you wanted to do it, why didn't you do it and get it done with?" demanded
+the indignant Mr. R. S---.  "Why did you not get under the water and make
+an end of it, instead of giving us all this trouble and bother?"
+
+Poverty, misery, and fear of the workhouse, are the principal causes of
+suicide among the working classes.  "I'll drown myself before I go into
+the workhouse," said Ellen Hughes Hunt, aged fifty-two.  Last Wednesday
+they held an inquest on her body at Shoreditch.  Her husband came from
+the Islington Workhouse to testify.  He had been a cheesemonger, but
+failure in business and poverty had driven him into the workhouse,
+whither his wife had refused to accompany him.
+
+She was last seen at one in the morning.  Three hours later her hat and
+jacket were found on the towing path by the Regent's Canal, and later her
+body was fished from the water.  _Verdict: Suicide during temporary
+insanity_.
+
+Such verdicts are crimes against truth.  The Law is a lie, and through it
+men lie most shamelessly.  For instance, a disgraced woman, forsaken and
+spat upon by kith and kin, doses herself and her baby with laudanum.  The
+baby dies; but she pulls through after a few weeks in hospital, is
+charged with murder, convicted, and sentenced to ten years' penal
+servitude.  Recovering, the Law holds her responsible for her actions;
+yet, had she died, the same Law would have rendered a verdict of
+temporary insanity.
+
+Now, considering the case of Ellen Hughes Hunt, it is as fair and logical
+to say that her husband was suffering from temporary insanity when he
+went into the Islington Workhouse, as it is to say that she was suffering
+from temporary insanity when she went into the Regent's Canal.  As to
+which is the preferable sojourning place is a matter of opinion, of
+intellectual judgment.  I, for one, from what I know of canals and
+workhouses, should choose the canal, were I in a similar position.  And I
+make bold to contend that I am no more insane than Ellen Hughes Hunt, her
+husband, and the rest of the human herd.
+
+Man no longer follows instinct with the old natural fidelity.  He has
+developed into a reasoning creature, and can intellectually cling to life
+or discard life just as life happens to promise great pleasure or pain.  I
+dare to assert that Ellen Hughes Hunt, defrauded and bilked of all the
+joys of life which fifty-two years' service in the world has earned, with
+nothing but the horrors of the workhouse before her, was very rational
+and level-headed when she elected to jump into the canal.  And I dare to
+assert, further, that the jury had done a wiser thing to bring in a
+verdict charging society with temporary insanity for allowing Ellen
+Hughes Hunt to be defrauded and bilked of all the joys of life which
+fifty-two years' service in the world had earned.
+
+Temporary insanity!  Oh, these cursed phrases, these lies of language,
+under which people with meat in their bellies and whole shirts on their
+backs shelter themselves, and evade the responsibility of their brothers
+and sisters, empty of belly and without whole shirts on their backs.
+
+From one issue of the _Observer_, an East End paper, I quote the
+following commonplace events:-
+
+   A ship's fireman, named Johnny King, was charged with attempting to
+   commit suicide.  On Wednesday defendant went to Bow Police Station and
+   stated that he had swallowed a quantity of phosphor paste, as he was
+   hard up and unable to obtain work.  King was taken inside and an
+   emetic administered, when he vomited up a quantity of the poison.
+   Defendant now said he was very sorry.  Although he had sixteen years'
+   good character, he was unable to obtain work of any kind.  Mr.
+   Dickinson had defendant put back for the court missionary to see him.
+
+   Timothy Warner, thirty-two, was remanded for a similar offence.  He
+   jumped off Limehouse Pier, and when rescued, said, "I intended to do
+   it."
+
+   A decent-looking young woman, named Ellen Gray, was remanded on a
+   charge of attempting to commit suicide.  About half-past eight on
+   Sunday morning Constable 834 K found defendant lying in a doorway in
+   Benworth Street, and she was in a very drowsy condition.  She was
+   holding an empty bottle in one hand, and stated that some two or three
+   hours previously she had swallowed a quantity of laudanum.  As she was
+   evidently very ill, the divisional surgeon was sent for, and having
+   administered some coffee, ordered that she was to be kept awake.  When
+   defendant was charged, she stated that the reason why she attempted to
+   take her life was she had neither home nor friends.
+
+I do not say that all people who commit suicide are sane, no more than I
+say that all people who do not commit suicide are sane.  Insecurity of
+food and shelter, by the way, is a great cause of insanity among the
+living.  Costermongers, hawkers, and pedlars, a class of workers who live
+from hand to mouth more than those of any other class, form the highest
+percentage of those in the lunatic asylums.  Among the males each year,
+26.9 per 10,000 go insane, and among the women, 36.9.  On the other hand,
+of soldiers, who are at least sure of food and shelter, 13 per 10,000 go
+insane; and of farmers and graziers, only 5.1.  So a coster is twice as
+likely to lose his reason as a soldier, and five times as likely as a
+farmer.
+
+Misfortune and misery are very potent in turning people's heads, and
+drive one person to the lunatic asylum, and another to the morgue or the
+gallows.  When the thing happens, and the father and husband, for all of
+his love for wife and children and his willingness to work, can get no
+work to do, it is a simple matter for his reason to totter and the light
+within his brain go out.  And it is especially simple when it is taken
+into consideration that his body is ravaged by innutrition and disease,
+in addition to his soul being torn by the sight of his suffering wife and
+little ones.
+
+"He is a good-looking man, with a mass of black hair, dark, expressive
+eyes, delicately chiselled nose and chin, and wavy, fair moustache."  This
+is the reporter's description of Frank Cavilla as he stood in court, this
+dreary month of September, "dressed in a much worn grey suit, and wearing
+no collar."
+
+Frank Cavilla lived and worked as a house decorator in London.  He is
+described as a good workman, a steady fellow, and not given to drink,
+while all his neighbours unite in testifying that he was a gentle and
+affectionate husband and father.
+
+His wife, Hannah Cavilla, was a big, handsome, light-hearted woman.  She
+saw to it that his children were sent neat and clean (the neighbours all
+remarked the fact) to the Childeric Road Board School.  And so, with such
+a man, so blessed, working steadily and living temperately, all went
+well, and the goose hung high.
+
+Then the thing happened.  He worked for a Mr. Beck, builder, and lived in
+one of his master's houses in Trundley Road.  Mr. Beck was thrown from
+his trap and killed.  The thing was an unruly horse, and, as I say, it
+happened.  Cavilla had to seek fresh employment and find another house.
+
+This occurred eighteen months ago.  For eighteen months he fought the big
+fight.  He got rooms in a little house in Batavia Road, but could not
+make both ends meet.  Steady work could not be obtained.  He struggled
+manfully at casual employment of all sorts, his wife and four children
+starving before his eyes.  He starved himself, and grew weak, and fell
+ill.  This was three months ago, and then there was absolutely no food at
+all.  They made no complaint, spoke no word; but poor folk know.  The
+housewives of Batavia Road sent them food, but so respectable were the
+Cavillas that the food was sent anonymously, mysteriously, so as not to
+hurt their pride.
+
+The thing had happened.  He had fought, and starved, and suffered for
+eighteen months.  He got up one September morning, early.  He opened his
+pocket-knife.  He cut the throat of his wife, Hannah Cavilla, aged thirty-
+three.  He cut the throat of his first-born, Frank, aged twelve.  He cut
+the throat of his son, Walter, aged eight.  He cut the throat of his
+daughter, Nellie, aged four.  He cut the throat of his youngest-born,
+Ernest, aged sixteen months.  Then he watched beside the dead all day
+until the evening, when the police came, and he told them to put a penny
+in the slot of the gas-meter in order that they might have light to see.
+
+Frank Cavilla stood in court, dressed in a much worn grey suit, and
+wearing no collar.  He was a good-looking man, with a mass of black hair,
+dark, expressive eyes, delicately chiselled nose and chin, and wavy, fair
+moustache.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII--THE CHILDREN
+
+
+   "Where home is a hovel, and dull we grovel,
+   Forgetting the world is fair."
+
+There is one beautiful sight in the East End, and only one, and it is the
+children dancing in the street when the organ-grinder goes his round.  It
+is fascinating to watch them, the new-born, the next generation, swaying
+and stepping, with pretty little mimicries and graceful inventions all
+their own, with muscles that move swiftly and easily, and bodies that
+leap airily, weaving rhythms never taught in dancing school.
+
+I have talked with these children, here, there, and everywhere, and they
+struck me as being bright as other children, and in many ways even
+brighter.  They have most active little imaginations.  Their capacity for
+projecting themselves into the realm of romance and fantasy is
+remarkable.  A joyous life is romping in their blood.  They delight in
+music, and motion, and colour, and very often they betray a startling
+beauty of face and form under their filth and rags.
+
+But there is a Pied Piper of London Town who steals them all away.  They
+disappear.  One never sees them again, or anything that suggests them.
+You may look for them in vain amongst the generation of grown-ups.  Here
+you will find stunted forms, ugly faces, and blunt and stolid minds.
+Grace, beauty, imagination, all the resiliency of mind and muscle, are
+gone.  Sometimes, however, you may see a woman, not necessarily old, but
+twisted and deformed out of all womanhood, bloated and drunken, lift her
+draggled skirts and execute a few grotesque and lumbering steps upon the
+pavement.  It is a hint that she was once one of those children who
+danced to the organ-grinder.  Those grotesque and lumbering steps are all
+that is left of the promise of childhood.  In the befogged recesses of
+her brain has arisen a fleeting memory that she was once a girl.  The
+crowd closes in.  Little girls are dancing beside her, about her, with
+all the pretty graces she dimly recollects, but can no more than parody
+with her body.  Then she pants for breath, exhausted, and stumbles out
+through the circle.  But the little girls dance on.
+
+The children of the Ghetto possess all the qualities which make for noble
+manhood and womanhood; but the Ghetto itself, like an infuriated tigress
+turning on its young, turns upon and destroys all these qualities, blots
+out the light and laughter, and moulds those it does not kill into sodden
+and forlorn creatures, uncouth, degraded, and wretched below the beasts
+of the field.
+
+As to the manner in which this is done, I have in previous chapters
+described it at length; here let Professor Huxley describe it in brief:-
+
+"Any one who is acquainted with the state of the population of all great
+industrial centres, whether in this or other countries, is aware that
+amidst a large and increasing body of that population there reigns
+supreme . . . that condition which the French call _la misere_, a word
+for which I do not think there is any exact English equivalent.  It is a
+condition in which the food, warmth, and clothing which are necessary for
+the mere maintenance of the functions of the body in their normal state
+cannot be obtained; in which men, women, and children are forced to crowd
+into dens wherein decency is abolished, and the most ordinary conditions
+of healthful existence are impossible of attainment; in which the
+pleasures within reach are reduced to brutality and drunkenness; in which
+the pains accumulate at compound interest in the shape of starvation,
+disease, stunted development, and moral degradation; in which the
+prospect of even steady and honest industry is a life of unsuccessful
+battling with hunger, rounded by a pauper's grave."
+
+In such conditions, the outlook for children is hopeless.  They die like
+flies, and those that survive, survive because they possess excessive
+vitality and a capacity of adaptation to the degradation with which they
+are surrounded.  They have no home life.  In the dens and lairs in which
+they live they are exposed to all that is obscene and indecent.  And as
+their minds are made rotten, so are their bodies made rotten by bad
+sanitation, overcrowding, and underfeeding.  When a father and mother
+live with three or four children in a room where the children take turn
+about in sitting up to drive the rats away from the sleepers, when those
+children never have enough to eat and are preyed upon and made miserable
+and weak by swarming vermin, the sort of men and women the survivors will
+make can readily be imagined.
+
+   "Dull despair and misery
+   Lie about them from their birth;
+   Ugly curses, uglier mirth,
+   Are their earliest lullaby."
+
+A man and a woman marry and set up housekeeping in one room.  Their
+income does not increase with the years, though their family does, and
+the man is exceedingly lucky if he can keep his health and his job.  A
+baby comes, and then another.  This means that more room should be
+obtained; but these little mouths and bodies mean additional expense and
+make it absolutely impossible to get more spacious quarters.  More babies
+come.  There is not room in which to turn around.  The youngsters run the
+streets, and by the time they are twelve or fourteen the room-issue comes
+to a head, and out they go on the streets for good.  The boy, if he be
+lucky, can manage to make the common lodging-houses, and he may have any
+one of several ends.  But the girl of fourteen or fifteen, forced in this
+manner to leave the one room called home, and able to earn at the best a
+paltry five or six shillings per week, can have but one end.  And the
+bitter end of that one end is such as that of the woman whose body the
+police found this morning in a doorway in Dorset Street, Whitechapel.
+Homeless, shelterless, sick, with no one with her in her last hour, she
+had died in the night of exposure.  She was sixty-two years old and a
+match vendor.  She died as a wild animal dies.
+
+Fresh in my mind is the picture of a boy in the dock of an East End
+police court.  His head was barely visible above the railing.  He was
+being proved guilty of stealing two shillings from a woman, which he had
+spent, not for candy and cakes and a good time, but for food.
+
+"Why didn't you ask the woman for food?" the magistrate demanded, in a
+hurt sort of tone.  "She would surely have given you something to eat."
+
+"If I 'ad arsked 'er, I'd got locked up for beggin'," was the boy's
+reply.
+
+The magistrate knitted his brows and accepted the rebuke.  Nobody knew
+the boy, nor his father or mother.  He was without beginning or
+antecedent, a waif, a stray, a young cub seeking his food in the jungle
+of empire, preying upon the weak and being preyed upon by the strong.
+
+The people who try to help, who gather up the Ghetto children and send
+them away on a day's outing to the country, believe that not very many
+children reach the age of ten without having had at least one day there.
+Of this, a writer says: "The mental change caused by one day so spent
+must not be undervalued.  Whatever the circumstances, the children learn
+the meaning of fields and woods, so that descriptions of country scenery
+in the books they read, which before conveyed no impression, become now
+intelligible."
+
+One day in the fields and woods, if they are lucky enough to be picked up
+by the people who try to help!  And they are being born faster every day
+than they can be carted off to the fields and woods for the one day in
+their lives.  One day!  In all their lives, one day!  And for the rest of
+the days, as the boy told a certain bishop, "At ten we 'ops the wag; at
+thirteen we nicks things; an' at sixteen we bashes the copper."  Which is
+to say, at ten they play truant, at thirteen steal, and at sixteen are
+sufficiently developed hooligans to smash the policemen.
+
+The Rev. J. Cartmel Robinson tells of a boy and girl of his parish who
+set out to walk to the forest.  They walked and walked through the never-
+ending streets, expecting always to see it by-and-by; until they sat down
+at last, faint and despairing, and were rescued by a kind woman who
+brought them back.  Evidently they had been overlooked by the people who
+try to help.
+
+The same gentleman is authority for the statement that in a street in
+Hoxton (a district of the vast East End), over seven hundred children,
+between five and thirteen years, live in eighty small houses.  And he
+adds: "It is because London has largely shut her children in a maze of
+streets and houses and robbed them of their rightful inheritance in sky
+and field and brook, that they grow up to be men and women physically
+unfit."
+
+He tells of a member of his congregation who let a basement room to a
+married couple.  "They said they had two children; when they got
+possession it turned out that they had four.  After a while a fifth
+appeared, and the landlord gave them notice to quit.  They paid no
+attention to it.  Then the sanitary inspector who has to wink at the law
+so often, came in and threatened my friend with legal proceedings.  He
+pleaded that he could not get them out.  They pleaded that nobody would
+have them with so many children at a rental within their means, which is
+one of the commonest complaints of the poor, by-the-bye.  What was to be
+done?  The landlord was between two millstones.  Finally he applied to
+the magistrate, who sent up an officer to inquire into the case.  Since
+that time about twenty days have elapsed, and nothing has yet been done.
+Is this a singular case?  By no means; it is quite common."
+
+Last week the police raided a disorderly house.  In one room were found
+two young children.  They were arrested and charged with being inmates
+the same as the women had been.  Their father appeared at the trial.  He
+stated that himself and wife and two older children, besides the two in
+the dock, occupied that room; he stated also that he occupied it because
+he could get no other room for the half-crown a week he paid for it.  The
+magistrate discharged the two juvenile offenders and warned the father
+that he was bringing his children up unhealthily.
+
+But there is no need further to multiply instances.  In London the
+slaughter of the innocents goes on on a scale more stupendous than any
+before in the history of the world.  And equally stupendous is the
+callousness of the people who believe in Christ, acknowledge God, and go
+to church regularly on Sunday.  For the rest of the week they riot about
+on the rents and profits which come to them from the East End stained
+with the blood of the children.  Also, at times, so peculiarly are they
+made, they will take half a million of these rents and profits and send
+it away to educate the black boys of the Soudan.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV--A VISION OF THE NIGHT
+
+
+   All these were years ago little red-coloured, pulpy infants, capable
+   of being kneaded, baked, into any social form you chose.--CARLYLE.
+
+Late last night I walked along Commercial Street from Spitalfields to
+Whitechapel, and still continuing south, down Leman Street to the docks.
+And as I walked I smiled at the East End papers, which, filled with civic
+pride, boastfully proclaim that there is nothing the matter with the East
+End as a living place for men and women.
+
+It is rather hard to tell a tithe of what I saw.  Much of it is
+untenable.  But in a general way I may say that I saw a nightmare, a
+fearful slime that quickened the pavement with life, a mess of
+unmentionable obscenity that put into eclipse the "nightly horror" of
+Piccadilly and the Strand.  It _was_ a menagerie of garmented bipeds that
+looked something like humans and more like beasts, and to complete the
+picture, brass-buttoned keepers kept order among them when they snarled
+too fiercely.
+
+I was glad the keepers were there, for I did not have on my "seafaring"
+clothes, and I was what is called a "mark" for the creatures of prey that
+prowled up and down.  At times, between keepers, these males looked at me
+sharply, hungrily, gutter-wolves that they were, and I was afraid of
+their hands, of their naked hands, as one may be afraid of the paws of a
+gorilla.  They reminded me of gorillas.  Their bodies were small, ill-
+shaped, and squat.  There were no swelling muscles, no abundant thews and
+wide-spreading shoulders.  They exhibited, rather, an elemental economy
+of nature, such as the cave-men must have exhibited.  But there was
+strength in those meagre bodies, the ferocious, primordial strength to
+clutch and gripe and tear and rend.  When they spring upon their human
+prey they are known even to bend the victim backward and double its body
+till the back is broken.  They possess neither conscience nor sentiment,
+and they will kill for a half-sovereign, without fear or favour, if they
+are given but half a chance.  They are a new species, a breed of city
+savages.  The streets and houses, alleys and courts, are their hunting
+grounds.  As valley and mountain are to the natural savage, street and
+building are valley and mountain to them.  The slum is their jungle, and
+they live and prey in the jungle.
+
+The dear soft people of the golden theatres and wonder-mansions of the
+West End do not see these creatures, do not dream that they exist.  But
+they are here, alive, very much alive in their jungle.  And woe the day,
+when England is fighting in her last trench, and her able-bodied men are
+on the firing line!  For on that day they will crawl out of their dens
+and lairs, and the people of the West End will see them, as the dear soft
+aristocrats of Feudal France saw them and asked one another, "Whence came
+they?"  "Are they men?"
+
+But they were not the only beasts that ranged the menagerie.  They were
+only here and there, lurking in dark courts and passing like grey shadows
+along the walls; but the women from whose rotten loins they spring were
+everywhere.  They whined insolently, and in maudlin tones begged me for
+pennies, and worse.  They held carouse in every boozing ken, slatternly,
+unkempt, bleary-eyed, and towsled, leering and gibbering, overspilling
+with foulness and corruption, and, gone in debauch, sprawling across
+benches and bars, unspeakably repulsive, fearful to look upon.
+
+And there were others, strange, weird faces and forms and twisted
+monstrosities that shouldered me on every side, inconceivable types of
+sodden ugliness, the wrecks of society, the perambulating carcasses, the
+living deaths--women, blasted by disease and drink till their shame
+brought not tuppence in the open mart; and men, in fantastic rags,
+wrenched by hardship and exposure out of all semblance of men, their
+faces in a perpetual writhe of pain, grinning idiotically, shambling like
+apes, dying with every step they took and each breath they drew.  And
+there were young girls, of eighteen and twenty, with trim bodies and
+faces yet untouched with twist and bloat, who had fetched the bottom of
+the Abyss plump, in one swift fall.  And I remember a lad of fourteen,
+and one of six or seven, white-faced and sickly, homeless, the pair of
+them, who sat upon the pavement with their backs against a railing and
+watched it all.
+
+The unfit and the unneeded!  Industry does not clamour for them.  There
+are no jobs going begging through lack of men and women.  The dockers
+crowd at the entrance gate, and curse and turn away when the foreman does
+not give them a call.  The engineers who have work pay six shillings a
+week to their brother engineers who can find nothing to do; 514,000
+textile workers oppose a resolution condemning the employment of children
+under fifteen.  Women, and plenty to spare, are found to toil under the
+sweat-shop masters for tenpence a day of fourteen hours.  Alfred Freeman
+crawls to muddy death because he loses his job.  Ellen Hughes Hunt
+prefers Regent's Canal to Islington Workhouse.  Frank Cavilla cuts the
+throats of his wife and children because he cannot find work enough to
+give them food and shelter.
+
+The unfit and the unneeded!  The miserable and despised and forgotten,
+dying in the social shambles.  The progeny of prostitution--of the
+prostitution of men and women and children, of flesh and blood, and
+sparkle and spirit; in brief, the prostitution of labour.  If this is the
+best that civilisation can do for the human, then give us howling and
+naked savagery.  Far better to be a people of the wilderness and desert,
+of the cave and the squatting-place, than to be a people of the machine
+and the Abyss.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV--THE HUNGER WAIL
+
+
+"My father has more stamina than I, for he is country-born."
+
+The speaker, a bright young East Ender, was lamenting his poor physical
+development.
+
+"Look at my scrawny arm, will you."  He pulled up his sleeve.  "Not
+enough to eat, that's what's the matter with it.  Oh, not now.  I have
+what I want to eat these days.  But it's too late.  It can't make up for
+what I didn't have to eat when I was a kiddy.  Dad came up to London from
+the Fen Country.  Mother died, and there were six of us kiddies and dad
+living in two small rooms.
+
+"He had hard times, dad did.  He might have chucked us, but he didn't.  He
+slaved all day, and at night he came home and cooked and cared for us.  He
+was father and mother, both.  He did his best, but we didn't have enough
+to eat.  We rarely saw meat, and then of the worst.  And it is not good
+for growing kiddies to sit down to a dinner of bread and a bit of cheese,
+and not enough of it.
+
+"And what's the result?  I am undersized, and I haven't the stamina of my
+dad.  It was starved out of me.  In a couple of generations there'll be
+no more of me here in London.  Yet there's my younger brother; he's
+bigger and better developed.  You see, dad and we children held together,
+and that accounts for it."
+
+"But I don't see," I objected.  "I should think, under such conditions,
+that the vitality should decrease and the younger children be born weaker
+and weaker."
+
+"Not when they hold together," he replied.  "Whenever you come along in
+the East End and see a child of from eight to twelve, good-sized, well-
+developed, and healthy-looking, just you ask and you will find that it is
+the youngest in the family, or at least is one of the younger.  The way
+of it is this: the older children starve more than the younger ones.  By
+the time the younger ones come along, the older ones are starting to
+work, and there is more money coming in, and more food to go around."
+
+He pulled down his sleeve, a concrete instance of where chronic
+semi-starvation kills not, but stunts.  His voice was but one among the
+myriads that raise the cry of the hunger wail in the greatest empire in
+the world.  On any one day, over 1,000,000 people are in receipt of poor-
+law relief in the United Kingdom.  One in eleven of the whole working-
+class receive poor-law relief in the course of the year; 37,500,000
+people receive less than 12 pounds per month, per family; and a constant
+army of 8,000,000 lives on the border of starvation.
+
+A committee of the London County school board makes this declaration: "At
+times, _when there is no special distress_, 55,000 children in a state of
+hunger, which makes it useless to attempt to teach them, are in the
+schools of London alone."  The italics are mine.  "When there is no
+special distress" means good times in England; for the people of England
+have come to look upon starvation and suffering, which they call
+"distress," as part of the social order.  Chronic starvation is looked
+upon as a matter of course.  It is only when acute starvation makes its
+appearance on a large scale that they think something is unusual
+
+I shall never forget the bitter wail of a blind man in a little East End
+shop at the close of a murky day.  He had been the eldest of five
+children, with a mother and no father.  Being the eldest, he had starved
+and worked as a child to put bread into the mouths of his little brothers
+and sisters.  Not once in three months did he ever taste meat.  He never
+knew what it was to have his hunger thoroughly appeased.  And he claimed
+that this chronic starvation of his childhood had robbed him of his
+sight.  To support the claim, he quoted from the report of the Royal
+Commission on the Blind, "Blindness is more prevalent in poor districts,
+and poverty accelerates this dreadful affliction."
+
+But he went further, this blind man, and in his voice was the bitterness
+of an afflicted man to whom society did not give enough to eat.  He was
+one of an enormous army of blind in London, and he said that in the blind
+homes they did not receive half enough to eat.  He gave the diet for a
+day:-
+
+Breakfast--0.75 pint of skilly and dry bread.
+Dinner   --3 oz. meat.
+            1 slice of bread.
+            0.5 lb. potatoes.
+Supper   --0.75 pint of skilly and dry bread.
+
+Oscar Wilde, God rest his soul, voices the cry of the prison child,
+which, in varying degree, is the cry of the prison man and woman:-
+
+"The second thing from which a child suffers in prison is hunger.  The
+food that is given to it consists of a piece of usually bad-baked prison
+bread and a tin of water for breakfast at half-past seven.  At twelve
+o'clock it gets dinner, composed of a tin of coarse Indian meal stirabout
+(skilly), and at half-past five it gets a piece of dry bread and a tin of
+water for its supper.  This diet in the case of a strong grown man is
+always productive of illness of some kind, chiefly of course diarrhoea,
+with its attendant weakness.  In fact, in a big prison astringent
+medicines are served out regularly by the warders as a matter of course.
+In the case of a child, the child is, as a rule, incapable of eating the
+food at all.  Any one who knows anything about children knows how easily
+a child's digestion is upset by a fit of crying, or trouble and mental
+distress of any kind.  A child who has been crying all day long, and
+perhaps half the night, in a lonely dim-lit cell, and is preyed upon by
+terror, simply cannot eat food of this coarse, horrible kind.  In the
+case of the little child to whom Warder Martin gave the biscuits, the
+child was crying with hunger on Tuesday morning, and utterly unable to
+eat the bread and water served to it for its breakfast.  Martin went out
+after the breakfasts had been served and bought the few sweet biscuits
+for the child rather than see it starving.  It was a beautiful action on
+his part, and was so recognised by the child, who, utterly unconscious of
+the regulations of the Prison Board, told one of the senior wardens how
+kind this junior warden had been to him.  The result was, of course, a
+report and a dismissal."
+
+Robert Blatchford compares the workhouse pauper's daily diet with the
+soldier's, which, when he was a soldier, was not considered liberal
+enough, and yet is twice as liberal as the pauper's.
+
+PAUPER    DIET          SOLDIER
+3.25 oz.  Meat          12 oz.
+15.5 oz.  Bread         24 oz.
+6 oz.     Vegetables     8 oz.
+
+The adult male pauper gets meat (outside of soup) but once a week, and
+the paupers "have nearly all that pallid, pasty complexion which is the
+sure mark of starvation."
+
+Here is a table, comparing the workhouse officer's weekly allowance:-
+
+OFFICER    DIET          PAUPER
+7 lb.      Bread         6.75 lb.
+5 lb.      Meat          1 lb. 2 oz.
+12 oz.     Bacon         2.5 oz.
+8 oz.      Cheese        2 oz.
+7 lb.      Potatoes      1.5 lb.
+6 lb.      Vegetables    none.
+1 lb.      Flour         none.
+2 oz.      Lard          none.
+12 oz.     Butter        7 oz.
+none.      Rice Pudding  1 lb.
+
+And as the same writer remarks: "The officer's diet is still more liberal
+than the pauper's; but evidently it is not considered liberal enough, for
+a footnote is added to the officer's table saying that 'a cash payment of
+two shillings and sixpence a week is also made to each resident officer
+and servant.'  If the pauper has ample food, why does the officer have
+more?  And if the officer has not too much, can the pauper be properly
+fed on less than half the amount?"
+
+But it is not alone the Ghetto-dweller, the prisoner, and the pauper that
+starve.  Hodge, of the country, does not know what it is always to have a
+full belly.  In truth, it is his empty belly which has driven him to the
+city in such great numbers.  Let us investigate the way of living of a
+labourer from a parish in the Bradfield Poor Law Union, Berks.  Supposing
+him to have two children, steady work, a rent-free cottage, and an
+average weekly wage of thirteen shillings, which is equivalent to $3.25,
+then here is his weekly budget:-
+
+                                      s.  d.
+Bread (5 quarterns)                   1   10
+Flour (0.5 gallon)                    0   4
+Tea (0.25 lb.)                        0   6
+Butter (1 lb.)                        1   3
+Lard (1 lb.)                          0   6
+Sugar (6 lb.)                         1   0
+Bacon or other meat (about 0.25 lb.)  2   8
+Cheese (1 lb.)                        0   8
+Milk (half-tin condensed)             0   3.25
+Coal                                  1   6
+Beer                                  none
+Tobacco                               none
+Insurance ("Prudential")              0   3
+Labourers' Union                      0   1
+Wood, tools, dispensary, &c.          0   6
+Insurance ("Foresters") and margin    1   1.75
+        for clothes
+Total                                13   0
+
+The guardians of the workhouse in the above Union pride themselves on
+their rigid economy.  It costs per pauper per week:-
+
+               s.   d.
+Men            6    1.5
+Women          5    6.5
+Children       5    1.25
+
+If the labourer whose budget has been described should quit his toil and
+go into the workhouse, he would cost the guardians for
+
+               s.   d.
+Himself        6    1.5
+Wife           5    6.5
+Two children  10    2.5
+Total         21    10.5
+Or roughly, $5.46
+
+It would require more than a guinea for the workhouse to care for him and
+his family, which he, somehow, manages to do on thirteen shillings.  And
+in addition, it is an understood fact that it is cheaper to cater for a
+large number of people--buying, cooking, and serving wholesale--than it
+is to cater for a small number of people, say a family.
+
+Nevertheless, at the time this budget was compiled, there was in that
+parish another family, not of four, but eleven persons, who had to live
+on an income, not of thirteen shillings, but of twelve shillings per week
+(eleven shillings in winter), and which had, not a rent-free cottage, but
+a cottage for which it paid three shillings per week.
+
+This must be understood, and understood clearly: _Whatever is true of
+London in the way of poverty and degradation, is true of all England_.
+While Paris is not by any means France, the city of London is England.
+The frightful conditions which mark London an inferno likewise mark the
+United Kingdom an inferno.  The argument that the decentralisation of
+London would ameliorate conditions is a vain thing and false.  If the
+6,000,000 people of London were separated into one hundred cities each
+with a population of 60,000, misery would be decentralised but not
+diminished.  The sum of it would remain as large.
+
+In this instance, Mr. B. S. Rowntree, by an exhaustive analysis, has
+proved for the country town what Mr. Charles Booth has proved for the
+metropolis, that fully one-fourth of the dwellers are condemned to a
+poverty which destroys them physically and spiritually; that fully one-
+fourth of the dwellers do not have enough to eat, are inadequately
+clothed, sheltered, and warmed in a rigorous climate, and are doomed to a
+moral degeneracy which puts them lower than the savage in cleanliness and
+decency.
+
+After listening to the wail of an old Irish peasant in Kerry, Robert
+Blatchford asked him what he wanted.  "The old man leaned upon his spade
+and looked out across the black peat fields at the lowering skies.  'What
+is it that I'm wantun?' he said; then in a deep plaintive tone he
+continued, more to himself than to me, 'All our brave bhoys and dear
+gurrls is away an' over the says, an' the agent has taken the pig off me,
+an' the wet has spiled the praties, an' I'm an owld man, _an' I want the
+Day av Judgment_.'"
+
+The Day of Judgment!  More than he want it.  From all the land rises the
+hunger wail, from Ghetto and countryside, from prison and casual ward,
+from asylum and workhouse--the cry of the people who have not enough to
+eat.  Millions of people, men, women, children, little babes, the blind,
+the deaf, the halt, the sick, vagabonds and toilers, prisoners and
+paupers, the people of Ireland, England, Scotland, Wales, who have not
+enough to eat.  And this, in face of the fact that five men can produce
+bread for a thousand; that one workman can produce cotton cloth for 250
+people, woollens for 300, and boots and shoes for 1000.  It would seem
+that 40,000,000 people are keeping a big house, and that they are keeping
+it badly.  The income is all right, but there is something criminally
+wrong with the management.  And who dares to say that it is not
+criminally mismanaged, this big house, when five men can produce bread
+for a thousand, and yet millions have not enough to eat?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVI--DRINK, TEMPERANCE, AND THRIFT
+
+
+The English working classes may be said to be soaked in beer.  They are
+made dull and sodden by it.  Their efficiency is sadly impaired, and they
+lose whatever imagination, invention, and quickness may be theirs by
+right of race.  It may hardly be called an acquired habit, for they are
+accustomed to it from their earliest infancy.  Children are begotten in
+drunkenness, saturated in drink before they draw their first breath, born
+to the smell and taste of it, and brought up in the midst of it.
+
+The public-house is ubiquitous.  It flourishes on every corner and
+between corners, and it is frequented almost as much by women as by men.
+Children are to be found in it as well, waiting till their fathers and
+mothers are ready to go home, sipping from the glasses of their elders,
+listening to the coarse language and degrading conversation, catching the
+contagion of it, familiarising themselves with licentiousness and
+debauchery.
+
+Mrs. Grundy rules as supremely over the workers as she does over the
+bourgeoisie; but in the case of the workers, the one thing she does not
+frown upon is the public-house.  No disgrace or shame attaches to it, nor
+to the young woman or girl who makes a practice of entering it.
+
+I remember a girl in a coffee-house saying, "I never drink spirits when
+in a public-'ouse."  She was a young and pretty waitress, and she was
+laying down to another waitress her pre-eminent respectability and
+discretion.  Mrs. Grundy drew the line at spirits, but allowed that it
+was quite proper for a clean young girl to drink beer, and to go into a
+public-house to drink it.
+
+Not only is this beer unfit for the people to drink, but too often the
+men and women are unfit to drink it.  On the other hand, it is their very
+unfitness that drives them to drink it.  Ill-fed, suffering from
+innutrition and the evil effects of overcrowding and squalor, their
+constitutions develop a morbid craving for the drink, just as the sickly
+stomach of the overstrung Manchester factory operative hankers after
+excessive quantities of pickles and similar weird foods.  Unhealthy
+working and living engenders unhealthy appetites and desires.  Man cannot
+be worked worse than a horse is worked, and be housed and fed as a pig is
+housed and fed, and at the same time have clean and wholesome ideals and
+aspirations.
+
+As home-life vanishes, the public-house appears.  Not only do men and
+women abnormally crave drink, who are overworked, exhausted, suffering
+from deranged stomachs and bad sanitation, and deadened by the ugliness
+and monotony of existence, but the gregarious men and women who have no
+home-life flee to the bright and clattering public-house in a vain
+attempt to express their gregariousness.  And when a family is housed in
+one small room, home-life is impossible.
+
+A brief examination of such a dwelling will serve to bring to light one
+important cause of drunkenness.  Here the family arises in the morning,
+dresses, and makes its toilet, father, mother, sons, and daughters, and
+in the same room, shoulder to shoulder (for the room is small), the wife
+and mother cooks the breakfast.  And in the same room, heavy and
+sickening with the exhalations of their packed bodies throughout the
+night, that breakfast is eaten.  The father goes to work, the elder
+children go to school or into the street, and the mother remains with her
+crawling, toddling youngsters to do her housework--still in the same
+room.  Here she washes the clothes, filling the pent space with soapsuds
+and the smell of dirty clothes, and overhead she hangs the wet linen to
+dry.
+
+Here, in the evening, amid the manifold smells of the day, the family
+goes to its virtuous couch.  That is to say, as many as possible pile
+into the one bed (if bed they have), and the surplus turns in on the
+floor.  And this is the round of their existence, month after month, year
+after year, for they never get a vacation save when they are evicted.
+When a child dies, and some are always bound to die, since fifty-five per
+cent. of the East End children die before they are five years old, the
+body is laid out in the same room.  And if they are very poor, it is kept
+for some time until they can bury it.  During the day it lies on the bed;
+during the night, when the living take the bed, the dead occupies the
+table, from which, in the morning, when the dead is put back into the
+bed, they eat their breakfast.  Sometimes the body is placed on the shelf
+which serves as a pantry for their food.  Only a couple of weeks ago, an
+East End woman was in trouble, because, in this fashion, being unable to
+bury it, she had kept her dead child three weeks.
+
+Now such a room as I have described is not home but horror; and the men
+and women who flee away from it to the public-house are to be pitied, not
+blamed.  There are 300,000 people, in London, divided into families that
+live in single rooms, while there are 900,000 who are illegally housed
+according to the Public Health Act of 1891--a respectable
+recruiting-ground for the drink traffic.
+
+Then there are the insecurity of happiness, the precariousness of
+existence, the well-founded fear of the future--potent factors in driving
+people to drink.  Wretchedness squirms for alleviation, and in the public-
+house its pain is eased and forgetfulness is obtained.  It is unhealthy.
+Certainly it is, but everything else about their lives is unhealthy,
+while this brings the oblivion that nothing else in their lives can
+bring.  It even exalts them, and makes them feel that they are finer and
+better, though at the same time it drags them down and makes them more
+beastly than ever.  For the unfortunate man or woman, it is a race
+between miseries that ends with death.
+
+It is of no avail to preach temperance and teetotalism to these people.
+The drink habit may be the cause of many miseries; but it is, in turn,
+the effect of other and prior miseries.  The temperance advocates may
+preach their hearts out over the evils of drink, but until the evils that
+cause people to drink are abolished, drink and its evils will remain.
+
+Until the people who try to help realise this, their well-intentioned
+efforts will be futile, and they will present a spectacle fit only to set
+Olympus laughing.  I have gone through an exhibition of Japanese art, got
+up for the poor of Whitechapel with the idea of elevating them, of
+begetting in them yearnings for the Beautiful and True and Good.  Granting
+(what is not so) that the poor folk are thus taught to know and yearn
+after the Beautiful and True and Good, the foul facts of their existence
+and the social law that dooms one in three to a public-charity death,
+demonstrate that this knowledge and yearning will be only so much of an
+added curse to them.  They will have so much more to forget than if they
+had never known and yearned.  Did Destiny to-day bind me down to the life
+of an East End slave for the rest of my years, and did Destiny grant me
+but one wish, I should ask that I might forget all about the Beautiful
+and True and Good; that I might forget all I had learned from the open
+books, and forget the people I had known, the things I had heard, and the
+lands I had seen.  And if Destiny didn't grant it, I am pretty confident
+that I should get drunk and forget it as often as possible.
+
+These people who try to help!  Their college settlements, missions,
+charities, and what not, are failures.  In the nature of things they
+cannot but be failures.  They are wrongly, though sincerely, conceived.
+They approach life through a misunderstanding of life, these good folk.
+They do not understand the West End, yet they come down to the East End
+as teachers and savants.  They do not understand the simple sociology of
+Christ, yet they come to the miserable and the despised with the pomp of
+social redeemers.  They have worked faithfully, but beyond relieving an
+infinitesimal fraction of misery and collecting a certain amount of data
+which might otherwise have been more scientifically and less expensively
+collected, they have achieved nothing.
+
+As some one has said, they do everything for the poor except get off
+their backs.  The very money they dribble out in their child's schemes
+has been wrung from the poor.  They come from a race of successful and
+predatory bipeds who stand between the worker and his wages, and they try
+to tell the worker what he shall do with the pitiful balance left to him.
+Of what use, in the name of God, is it to establish nurseries for women
+workers, in which, for instance, a child is taken while the mother makes
+violets in Islington at three farthings a gross, when more children and
+violet-makers than they can cope with are being born right along?  This
+violet-maker handles each flower four times, 576 handlings for three
+farthings, and in the day she handles the flowers 6912 times for a wage
+of ninepence.  She is being robbed.  Somebody is on her back, and a
+yearning for the Beautiful and True and Good will not lighten her burden.
+They do nothing for her, these dabblers; and what they do not do for the
+mother, undoes at night, when the child comes home, all that they have
+done for the child in the day.
+
+And one and all, they join in teaching a fundamental lie.  They do not
+know it is a lie, but their ignorance does not make it more of a truth.
+And the lie they preach is "thrift."  An instant will demonstrate it.  In
+overcrowded London, the struggle for a chance to work is keen, and
+because of this struggle wages sink to the lowest means of subsistence.
+To be thrifty means for a worker to spend less than his income--in other
+words, to live on less.  This is equivalent to a lowering of the standard
+of living.  In the competition for a chance to work, the man with a lower
+standard of living will underbid the man with a higher standard.  And a
+small group of such thrifty workers in any overcrowded industry will
+permanently lower the wages of that industry.  And the thrifty ones will
+no longer be thrifty, for their income will have been reduced till it
+balances their expenditure.
+
+In short, thrift negates thrift.  If every worker in England should heed
+the preachers of thrift and cut expenditure in half, the condition of
+there being more men to work than there is work to do would swiftly cut
+wages in half.  And then none of the workers of England would be thrifty,
+for they would be living up to their diminished incomes.  The
+short-sighted thrift-preachers would naturally be astounded at the
+outcome.  The measure of their failure would be precisely the measure of
+the success of their propaganda.  And, anyway, it is sheer bosh and
+nonsense to preach thrift to the 1,800,000 London workers who are divided
+into families which have a total income of less than 21s. per week, one
+quarter to one half of which must be paid for rent.
+
+Concerning the futility of the people who try to help, I wish to make one
+notable, noble exception, namely, the Dr. Barnardo Homes.  Dr. Barnardo
+is a child-catcher.  First, he catches them when they are young, before
+they are set, hardened, in the vicious social mould; and then he sends
+them away to grow up and be formed in another and better social mould.  Up
+to date he has sent out of the country 13,340 boys, most of them to
+Canada, and not one in fifty has failed.  A splendid record, when it is
+considered that these lads are waifs and strays, homeless and parentless,
+jerked out from the very bottom of the Abyss, and forty-nine out of fifty
+of them made into men.
+
+Every twenty-four hours in the year Dr. Barnardo snatches nine waifs from
+the streets; so the enormous field he has to work in may be comprehended.
+The people who try to help have something to learn from him.  He does not
+play with palliatives.  He traces social viciousness and misery to their
+sources.  He removes the progeny of the gutter-folk from their
+pestilential environment, and gives them a healthy, wholesome environment
+in which to be pressed and prodded and moulded into men.
+
+When the people who try to help cease their playing and dabbling with day
+nurseries and Japanese art exhibits and go back and learn their West End
+and the sociology of Christ, they will be in better shape to buckle down
+to the work they ought to be doing in the world.  And if they do buckle
+down to the work, they will follow Dr. Barnardo's lead, only on a scale
+as large as the nation is large.  They won't cram yearnings for the
+Beautiful, and True, and Good down the throat of the woman making violets
+for three farthings a gross, but they will make somebody get off her back
+and quit cramming himself till, like the Romans, he must go to a bath and
+sweat it out.  And to their consternation, they will find that they will
+have to get off that woman's back themselves, as well as the backs of a
+few other women and children they did not dream they were riding upon.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVII--THE MANAGEMENT
+
+
+In this final chapter it were well to look at the Social Abyss in its
+widest aspect, and to put certain questions to Civilisation, by the
+answers to which Civilisation must stand or fall.  For instance, has
+Civilisation bettered the lot of man?  "Man," I use in its democratic
+sense, meaning the average man.  So the question re-shapes itself: _Has
+Civilisation bettered the lot of the average man_?
+
+Let us see.  In Alaska, along the banks of the Yukon River, near its
+mouth, live the Innuit folk.  They are a very primitive people,
+manifesting but mere glimmering adumbrations of that tremendous artifice,
+Civilisation.  Their capital amounts possibly to 2 pounds per head.  They
+hunt and fish for their food with bone-headed spews and arrows.  They
+never suffer from lack of shelter.  Their clothes, largely made from the
+skins of animals, are warm.  They always have fuel for their fires,
+likewise timber for their houses, which they build partly underground,
+and in which they lie snugly during the periods of intense cold.  In the
+summer they live in tents, open to every breeze and cool.  They are
+healthy, and strong, and happy.  Their one problem is food.  They have
+their times of plenty and times of famine.  In good times they feast; in
+bad times they die of starvation.  But starvation, as a chronic
+condition, present with a large number of them all the time, is a thing
+unknown.  Further, they have no debts.
+
+In the United Kingdom, on the rim of the Western Ocean, live the English
+folk.  They are a consummately civilised people.  Their capital amounts
+to at least 300 pounds per head.  They gain their food, not by hunting
+and fishing, but by toil at colossal artifices.  For the most part, they
+suffer from lack of shelter.  The greater number of them are vilely
+housed, do not have enough fuel to keep them warm, and are insufficiently
+clothed.  A constant number never have any houses at all, and sleep
+shelterless under the stars.  Many are to be found, winter and summer,
+shivering on the streets in their rags.  They have good times and bad.  In
+good times most of them manage to get enough to eat, in bad times they
+die of starvation.  They are dying now, they were dying yesterday and
+last year, they will die to-morrow and next year, of starvation; for
+they, unlike the Innuit, suffer from a chronic condition of starvation.
+There are 40,000,000 of the English folk, and 939 out of every 1000 of
+them die in poverty, while a constant army of 8,000,000 struggles on the
+ragged edge of starvation.  Further, each babe that is born, is born in
+debt to the sum of 22 pounds.  This is because of an artifice called the
+National Debt.
+
+In a fair comparison of the average Innuit and the average Englishman, it
+will be seen that life is less rigorous for the Innuit; that while the
+Innuit suffers only during bad times from starvation, the Englishman
+suffers during good times as well; that no Innuit lacks fuel, clothing,
+or housing, while the Englishman is in perpetual lack of these three
+essentials.  In this connection it is well to instance the judgment of a
+man such as Huxley.  From the knowledge gained as a medical officer in
+the East End of London, and as a scientist pursuing investigations among
+the most elemental savages, he concludes, "Were the alternative presented
+to me, I would deliberately prefer the life of the savage to that of
+those people of Christian London."
+
+The creature comforts man enjoys are the products of man's labour.  Since
+Civilisation has failed to give the average Englishman food and shelter
+equal to that enjoyed by the Innuit, the question arises: _Has
+Civilisation increased the producing power of the average man_?  If it
+has not increased man's producing power, then Civilisation cannot stand.
+
+But, it will be instantly admitted, Civilisation has increased man's
+producing power.  Five men can produce bread for a thousand.  One man can
+produce cotton cloth for 250 people, woollens for 300, and boots and
+shoes for 1000.  Yet it has been shown throughout the pages of this book
+that English folk by the millions do not receive enough food, clothes,
+and boots.  Then arises the third and inexorable question: _If
+Civilisation has increased the producing power of the average man, why
+has it not bettered the lot of the average man_?
+
+There can be one answer only--MISMANAGEMENT.  Civilisation has made
+possible all manner of creature comforts and heart's delights.  In these
+the average Englishman does not participate.  If he shall be forever
+unable to participate, then Civilisation falls.  There is no reason for
+the continued existence of an artifice so avowed a failure.  But it is
+impossible that men should have reared this tremendous artifice in vain.
+It stuns the intellect.  To acknowledge so crushing a defeat is to give
+the death-blow to striving and progress.
+
+One other alternative, and one other only, presents itself.  _Civilisation
+must be compelled to better the lot of the average men_.  This accepted,
+it becomes at once a question of business management.  Things profitable
+must be continued; things unprofitable must be eliminated.  Either the
+Empire is a profit to England, or it is a loss.  If it is a loss, it must
+be done away with.  If it is a profit, it must be managed so that the
+average man comes in for a share of the profit.
+
+If the struggle for commercial supremacy is profitable, continue it.  If
+it is not, if it hurts the worker and makes his lot worse than the lot of
+a savage, then fling foreign markets and industrial empire overboard.  For
+it is a patent fact that if 40,000,000 people, aided by Civilisation,
+possess a greater individual producing power than the Innuit, then those
+40,000,000 people should enjoy more creature comforts and heart's
+delights than the Innuits enjoy.
+
+If the 400,000 English gentlemen, "of no occupation," according to their
+own statement in the Census of 1881, are unprofitable, do away with them.
+Set them to work ploughing game preserves and planting potatoes.  If they
+are profitable, continue them by all means, but let it be seen to that
+the average Englishman shares somewhat in the profits they produce by
+working at no occupation.
+
+In short, society must be reorganised, and a capable management put at
+the head.  That the present management is incapable, there can be no
+discussion.  It has drained the United Kingdom of its life-blood.  It has
+enfeebled the stay-at-home folk till they are unable longer to struggle
+in the van of the competing nations.  It has built up a West End and an
+East End as large as the Kingdom is large, in which one end is riotous
+and rotten, the other end sickly and underfed.
+
+A vast empire is foundering on the hands of this incapable management.
+And by empire is meant the political machinery which holds together the
+English-speaking people of the world outside of the United States.  Nor
+is this charged in a pessimistic spirit.  Blood empire is greater than
+political empire, and the English of the New World and the Antipodes are
+strong and vigorous as ever.  But the political empire under which they
+are nominally assembled is perishing.  The political machine known as the
+British Empire is running down.  In the hands of its management it is
+losing momentum every day.
+
+It is inevitable that this management, which has grossly and criminally
+mismanaged, shall be swept away.  Not only has it been wasteful and
+inefficient, but it has misappropriated the funds.  Every worn-out, pasty-
+faced pauper, every blind man, every prison babe, every man, woman, and
+child whose belly is gnawing with hunger pangs, is hungry because the
+funds have been misappropriated by the management.
+
+Nor can one member of this managing class plead not guilty before the
+judgment bar of Man.  "The living in their houses, and in their graves
+the dead," are challenged by every babe that dies of innutrition, by
+every girl that flees the sweater's den to the nightly promenade of
+Piccadilly, by every worked-out toiler that plunges into the canal.  The
+food this managing class eats, the wine it drinks, the shows it makes,
+and the fine clothes it wears, are challenged by eight million mouths
+which have never had enough to fill them, and by twice eight million
+bodies which have never been sufficiently clothed and housed.
+
+There can be no mistake.  Civilisation has increased man's producing
+power an hundred-fold, and through mismanagement the men of Civilisation
+live worse than the beasts, and have less to eat and wear and protect
+them from the elements than the savage Innuit in a frigid climate who
+lives to-day as he lived in the stone age ten thousand years ago.
+
+
+
+
+CHALLENGE
+
+
+I have a vague remembrance
+   Of a story that is told
+In some ancient Spanish legend
+   Or chronicle of old.
+
+It was when brave King Sanche
+   Was before Zamora slain,
+And his great besieging army
+   Lay encamped upon the plain.
+
+Don Diego de Ordenez
+   Sallied forth in front of all,
+And shouted loud his challenge
+   To the warders on the wall.
+
+All the people of Zamora,
+   Both the born and the unborn,
+As traitors did he challenge
+   With taunting words of scorn.
+
+The living in their houses,
+   And in their graves the dead,
+And the waters in their rivers,
+   And their wine, and oil, and bread.
+
+There is a greater army
+   That besets us round with strife,
+A starving, numberless army
+   At all the gates of life.
+
+The poverty-stricken millions
+   Who challenge our wine and bread,
+And impeach us all as traitors,
+   Both the living and the dead.
+
+And whenever I sit at the banquet,
+   Where the feast and song are high,
+Amid the mirth and music
+   I can hear that fearful cry.
+
+And hollow and haggard faces
+   Look into the lighted hall,
+And wasted hands are extended
+   To catch the crumbs that fall
+
+And within there is light and plenty,
+   And odours fill the air;
+But without there is cold and darkness,
+   And hunger and despair.
+
+And there in the camp of famine,
+   In wind, and cold, and rain,
+Christ, the great Lord of the Army,
+   Lies dead upon the plain.
+
+LONGFELLOW
+
+
+
+
+Footnotes:
+
+
+{1}  This in the Klondike.--J. L.
+
+{2}  "Runt" in America is the equivalent of the English "crowl," the
+dwarf of a litter.
+
+{3}  The San Francisco bricklayer receives twenty shillings per day, and
+at present is on strike for twenty-four shillings.
+
+
+
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+Project Gutenberg Etext of The People of the Abyss by Jack London
+#70 in our series by Jack London
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+The People of the Abyss
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+by Jack London
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+March, 1999  [Etext #1688]
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+This etext was prepared from the Thomas Nelson and Sons edition
+by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
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+
+
+THE PEOPLE OF THE ABYSS
+
+by Jack London
+
+
+
+
+The chief priests and rulers cry:-
+
+"O Lord and Master, not ours the guilt,
+We build but as our fathers built;
+Behold thine images how they stand
+Sovereign and sole through all our land.
+
+"Our task is hard--with sword and flame,
+To hold thine earth forever the same,
+And with sharp crooks of steel to keep,
+Still as thou leftest them, thy sheep."
+
+Then Christ sought out an artisan,
+A low-browed, stunted, haggard man,
+And a motherless girl whose fingers thin
+Crushed from her faintly want and sin.
+
+These set he in the midst of them,
+And as they drew back their garment hem
+For fear of defilement, "Lo, here," said he,
+"The images ye have made of me."
+
+JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL.
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+
+The experiences related in this volume fell to me in the summer of
+1902.  I went down into the under-world of London with an attitude
+of mind which I may best liken to that of the explorer.  I was open
+to be convinced by the evidence of my eyes, rather than by the
+teachings of those who had not seen, or by the words of those who
+had seen and gone before.  Further, I took with me certain simple
+criteria with which to measure the life of the under-world.  That
+which made for more life, for physical and spiritual health, was
+good; that which made for less life, which hurt, and dwarfed, and
+distorted life, was bad.
+
+It will be readily apparent to the reader that I saw much that was
+bad.  Yet it must not be forgotten that the time of which I write
+was considered "good times" in England.  The starvation and lack of
+shelter I encountered constituted a chronic condition of misery
+which is never wiped out, even in the periods of greatest
+prosperity.
+
+Following the summer in question came a hard winter.  Great numbers
+of the unemployed formed into processions, as many as a dozen at a
+time, and daily marched through the streets of London crying for
+bread.  Mr. Justin McCarthy, writing in the month of January 1903,
+to the New York Independent, briefly epitomises the situation as
+follows:-
+
+
+"The workhouses have no space left in which to pack the starving
+crowds who are craving every day and night at their doors for food
+and shelter.  All the charitable institutions have exhausted their
+means in trying to raise supplies of food for the famishing
+residents of the garrets and cellars of London lanes and alleys.
+The quarters of the Salvation Army in various parts of London are
+nightly besieged by hosts of the unemployed and the hungry for whom
+neither shelter nor the means of sustenance can be provided."
+
+
+It has been urged that the criticism I have passed on things as they
+are in England is too pessimistic.  I must say, in extenuation, that
+of optimists I am the most optimistic.  But I measure manhood less
+by political aggregations than by individuals.  Society grows, while
+political machines rack to pieces and become "scrap."  For the
+English, so far as manhood and womanhood and health and happiness
+go, I see a broad and smiling future.  But for a great deal of the
+political machinery, which at present mismanages for them, I see
+nothing else than the scrap heap.
+
+JACK LONDON.
+PIEDMONT, CALIFORNIA.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I--THE DESCENT
+
+
+
+"But you can't do it, you know," friends said, to whom I applied for
+assistance in the matter of sinking myself down into the East End of
+London.  "You had better see the police for a guide," they added, on
+second thought, painfully endeavouring to adjust themselves to the
+psychological processes of a madman who had come to them with better
+credentials than brains.
+
+"But I don't want to see the police," I protested.  "What I wish to
+do is to go down into the East End and see things for myself.  I
+wish to know how those people are living there, and why they are
+living there, and what they are living for.  In short, I am going to
+live there myself."
+
+"You don't want to LIVE down there!" everybody said, with
+disapprobation writ large upon their faces.  "Why, it is said there
+are places where a man's life isn't worth tu'pence."
+
+"The very places I wish to see," I broke in.
+
+"But you can't, you know," was the unfailing rejoinder.
+
+"Which is not what I came to see you about," I answered brusquely,
+somewhat nettled by their incomprehension.  "I am a stranger here,
+and I want you to tell me what you know of the East End, in order
+that I may have something to start on."
+
+"But we know nothing of the East End.  It is over there, somewhere."
+And they waved their hands vaguely in the direction where the sun on
+rare occasions may be seen to rise.
+
+"Then I shall go to Cook's," I announced.
+
+"Oh yes," they said, with relief.  "Cook's will be sure to know."
+
+But O Cook, O Thomas Cook & Son, path-finders and trail-clearers,
+living sign-posts to all the world, and bestowers of first aid to
+bewildered travellers--unhesitatingly and instantly, with ease and
+celerity, could you send me to Darkest Africa or Innermost Thibet,
+but to the East End of London, barely a stone's throw distant from
+Ludgate Circus, you know not the way!
+
+"You can't do it, you know," said the human emporium of routes and
+fares at Cook's Cheapside branch.  "It is so--hem--so unusual."
+
+"Consult the police," he concluded authoritatively, when I had
+persisted.  "We are not accustomed to taking travellers to the East
+End; we receive no call to take them there, and we know nothing
+whatsoever about the place at all."
+
+"Never mind that," I interposed, to save myself from being swept out
+of the office by his flood of negations.  "Here's something you can
+do for me.  I wish you to understand in advance what I intend doing,
+so that in case of trouble you may be able to identify me."
+
+"Ah, I see! should you be murdered, we would be in position to
+identify the corpse."
+
+He said it so cheerfully and cold-bloodedly that on the instant I
+saw my stark and mutilated cadaver stretched upon a slab where cool
+waters trickle ceaselessly, and him I saw bending over and sadly and
+patiently identifying it as the body of the insane American who
+WOULD see the East End.
+
+"No, no," I answered; "merely to identify me in case I get into a
+scrape with the 'bobbies.'"  This last I said with a thrill; truly,
+I was gripping hold of the vernacular.
+
+"That," he said, "is a matter for the consideration of the Chief
+Office."
+
+"It is so unprecedented, you know," he added apologetically.
+
+The man at the Chief Office hemmed and hawed.  "We make it a rule,"
+he explained, "to give no information concerning our clients."
+
+"But in this case," I urged, "it is the client who requests you to
+give the information concerning himself."
+
+Again he hemmed and hawed.
+
+"Of course," I hastily anticipated, "I know it is unprecedented,
+but--"
+
+"As I was about to remark," he went on steadily, "it is
+unprecedented, and I don't think we can do anything for you."
+
+However, I departed with the address of a detective who lived in the
+East End, and took my way to the American consul-general.  And here,
+at last, I found a man with whom I could "do business."  There was
+no hemming and hawing, no lifted brows, open incredulity, or blank
+amazement.  In one minute I explained myself and my project, which
+he accepted as a matter of course.  In the second minute he asked my
+age, height, and weight, and looked me over.  And in the third
+minute, as we shook hands at parting, he said:  "All right, Jack.
+I'll remember you and keep track."
+
+I breathed a sigh of relief.  Having burnt my ships behind me, I was
+now free to plunge into that human wilderness of which nobody seemed
+to know anything.  But at once I encountered a new difficulty in the
+shape of my cabby, a grey-whiskered and eminently decorous personage
+who had imperturbably driven me for several hours about the "City."
+
+"Drive me down to the East End," I ordered, taking my seat.
+
+"Where, sir?" he demanded with frank surprise.
+
+"To the East End, anywhere.  Go on."
+
+The hansom pursued an aimless way for several minutes, then came to
+a puzzled stop.  The aperture above my head was uncovered, and the
+cabman peered down perplexedly at me.
+
+"I say," he said, "wot plyce yer wanter go?"
+
+"East End," I repeated.  "Nowhere in particular.  Just drive me
+around anywhere."
+
+"But wot's the haddress, sir?"
+
+"See here!" I thundered.  "Drive me down to the East End, and at
+once!"
+
+It was evident that he did not understand, but he withdrew his head,
+and grumblingly started his horse.
+
+Nowhere in the streets of London may one escape the sight of abject
+poverty, while five minutes' walk from almost any point will bring
+one to a slum; but the region my hansom was now penetrating was one
+unending slum.  The streets were filled with a new and different
+race of people, short of stature, and of wretched or beer-sodden
+appearance.  We rolled along through miles of bricks and squalor,
+and from each cross street and alley flashed long vistas of bricks
+and misery.  Here and there lurched a drunken man or woman, and the
+air was obscene with sounds of jangling and squabbling.  At a
+market, tottery old men and women were searching in the garbage
+thrown in the mud for rotten potatoes, beans, and vegetables, while
+little children clustered like flies around a festering mass of
+fruit, thrusting their arms to the shoulders into the liquid
+corruption, and drawing forth morsels but partially decayed, which
+they devoured on the spot.
+
+Not a hansom did I meet with in all my drive, while mine was like an
+apparition from another and better world, the way the children ran
+after it and alongside.  And as far as I could see were the solid
+walls of brick, the slimy pavements, and the screaming streets; and
+for the first time in my life the fear of the crowd smote me.  It
+was like the fear of the sea; and the miserable multitudes, street
+upon street, seemed so many waves of a vast and malodorous sea,
+lapping about me and threatening to well up and over me.
+
+"Stepney, sir; Stepney Station," the cabby called down.
+
+I looked about.  It was really a railroad station, and he had driven
+desperately to it as the one familiar spot he had ever heard of in
+all that wilderness.
+
+"Well," I said.
+
+He spluttered unintelligibly, shook his head, and looked very
+miserable.  "I'm a strynger 'ere," he managed to articulate.  "An'
+if yer don't want Stepney Station, I'm blessed if I know wotcher do
+want."
+
+"I'll tell you what I want," I said.  "You drive along and keep your
+eye out for a shop where old clothes are sold.  Now, when you see
+such a shop, drive right on till you turn the corner, then stop and
+let me out."
+
+I could see that he was growing dubious of his fare, but not long
+afterwards he pulled up to the curb and informed me that an old-
+clothes shop was to be found a bit of the way back.
+
+"Won'tcher py me?" he pleaded.  "There's seven an' six owin' me."
+
+"Yes," I laughed, "and it would be the last I'd see of you."
+
+"Lord lumme, but it'll be the last I see of you if yer don't py me,"
+he retorted.
+
+But a crowd of ragged onlookers had already gathered around the cab,
+and I laughed again and walked back to the old-clothes shop.
+
+Here the chief difficulty was in making the shopman understand that
+I really and truly wanted old clothes.  But after fruitless attempts
+to press upon me new and impossible coats and trousers, he began to
+bring to light heaps of old ones, looking mysterious the while and
+hinting darkly.  This he did with the palpable intention of letting
+me know that he had "piped my lay," in order to bulldose me, through
+fear of exposure, into paying heavily for my purchases.  A man in
+trouble, or a high-class criminal from across the water, was what he
+took my measure for--in either case, a person anxious to avoid the
+police.
+
+But I disputed with him over the outrageous difference between
+prices and values, till I quite disabused him of the notion, and he
+settled down to drive a hard bargain with a hard customer.  In the
+end I selected a pair of stout though well-worn trousers, a frayed
+jacket with one remaining button, a pair of brogans which had
+plainly seen service where coal was shovelled, a thin leather belt,
+and a very dirty cloth cap.  My underclothing and socks, however,
+were new and warm, but of the sort that any American waif, down in
+his luck, could acquire in the ordinary course of events.
+
+"I must sy yer a sharp 'un," he said, with counterfeit admiration,
+as I handed over the ten shillings finally agreed upon for the
+outfit.  "Blimey, if you ain't ben up an' down Petticut Lane afore
+now.  Yer trouseys is wuth five bob to hany man, an' a docker 'ud
+give two an' six for the shoes, to sy nothin' of the coat an' cap
+an' new stoker's singlet an' hother things."
+
+"How much will you give me for them?" I demanded suddenly.  "I paid
+you ten bob for the lot, and I'll sell them back to you, right now,
+for eight!  Come, it's a go!"
+
+But he grinned and shook his head, and though I had made a good
+bargain, I was unpleasantly aware that he had made a better one.
+
+I found the cabby and a policeman with their heads together, but the
+latter, after looking me over sharply, and particularly scrutinizing
+the bundle under my arm, turned away and left the cabby to wax
+mutinous by himself.  And not a step would he budge till I paid him
+the seven shillings and sixpence owing him.  Whereupon he was
+willing to drive me to the ends of the earth, apologising profusely
+for his insistence, and explaining that one ran across queer
+customers in London Town.
+
+But he drove me only to Highbury Vale, in North London, where my
+luggage was waiting for me.  Here, next day, I took off my shoes
+(not without regret for their lightness and comfort), and my soft,
+grey travelling suit, and, in fact, all my clothing; and proceeded
+to array myself in the clothes of the other and unimaginable men,
+who must have been indeed unfortunate to have had to part with such
+rags for the pitiable sums obtainable from a dealer.
+
+Inside my stoker's singlet, in the armpit, I sewed a gold sovereign
+(an emergency sum certainly of modest proportions); and inside my
+stoker's singlet I put myself.  And then I sat down and moralised
+upon the fair years and fat, which had made my skin soft and brought
+the nerves close to the surface; for the singlet was rough and raspy
+as a hair shirt, and I am confident that the most rigorous of
+ascetics suffer no more than I did in the ensuing twenty-four hours.
+
+The remainder of my costume was fairly easy to put on, though the
+brogans, or brogues, were quite a problem.  As stiff and hard as if
+made of wood, it was only after a prolonged pounding of the uppers
+with my fists that I was able to get my feet into them at all.
+Then, with a few shillings, a knife, a handkerchief, and some brown
+papers and flake tobacco stowed away in my pockets, I thumped down
+the stairs and said good-bye to my foreboding friends.  As I paused
+out of the door, the "help," a comely middle-aged woman, could not
+conquer a grin that twisted her lips and separated them till the
+throat, out of involuntary sympathy, made the uncouth animal noises
+we are wont to designate as "laughter."
+
+No sooner was I out on the streets than I was impressed by the
+difference in status effected by my clothes.  All servility vanished
+from the demeanour of the common people with whom I came in contact.
+Presto! in the twinkling of an eye, so to say, I had become one of
+them.  My frayed and out-at-elbows jacket was the badge and
+advertisement of my class, which was their class.  It made me of
+like kind, and in place of the fawning and too respectful attention
+I had hitherto received, I now shared with them a comradeship.  The
+man in corduroy and dirty neckerchief no longer addressed me as
+"sir" or "governor."  It was "mate" now--and a fine and hearty word,
+with a tingle to it, and a warmth and gladness, which the other term
+does not possess.  Governor!  It smacks of mastery, and power, and
+high authority--the tribute of the man who is under to the man on
+top, delivered in the hope that he will let up a bit and ease his
+weight, which is another way of saying that it is an appeal for
+alms.
+
+This brings me to a delight I experienced in my rags and tatters
+which is denied the average American abroad.  The European traveller
+from the States, who is not a Croesus, speedily finds himself
+reduced to a chronic state of self-conscious sordidness by the
+hordes of cringing robbers who clutter his steps from dawn till
+dark, and deplete his pocket-book in a way that puts compound
+interest to the blush.
+
+In my rags and tatters I escaped the pestilence of tipping, and
+encountered men on a basis of equality.  Nay, before the day was out
+I turned the tables, and said, most gratefully, "Thank you, sir," to
+a gentleman whose horse I held, and who dropped a penny into my
+eager palm
+
+Other changes I discovered were wrought in my condition by my new
+garb.  In crossing crowded thoroughfares I found I had to be, if
+anything, more lively in avoiding vehicles, and it was strikingly
+impressed upon me that my life had cheapened in direct ratio with my
+clothes.  When before I inquired the way of a policeman, I was
+usually asked, "Bus or 'ansom, sir?"  But now the query became,
+"Walk or ride?"  Also, at the railway stations, a third-class ticket
+was now shoved out to me as a matter of course.
+
+But there was compensation for it all.  For the first time I met the
+English lower classes face to face, and knew them for what they
+were.  When loungers and workmen, at street corners and in public-
+houses, talked with me, they talked as one man to another, and they
+talked as natural men should talk, without the least idea of getting
+anything out of me for what they talked or the way they talked.
+
+And when at last I made into the East End, I was gratified to find
+that the fear of the crowd no longer haunted me.  I had become a
+part of it.  The vast and malodorous sea had welled up and over me,
+or I had slipped gently into it, and there was nothing fearsome
+about it--with the one exception of the stoker's singlet.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II--JOHNNY UPRIGHT
+
+
+
+I shall not give you the address of Johnny Upright.  Let it suffice
+that he lives in the most respectable street in the East End--a
+street that would be considered very mean in America, but a
+veritable oasis in the desert of East London.  It is surrounded on
+every side by close-packed squalor and streets jammed by a young and
+vile and dirty generation; but its own pavements are comparatively
+bare of the children who have no other place to play, while it has
+an air of desertion, so few are the people that come and go.
+
+Each house in this street, as in all the streets, is shoulder to
+shoulder with its neighbours.  To each house there is but one
+entrance, the front door; and each house is about eighteen feet
+wide, with a bit of a brick-walled yard behind, where, when it is
+not raining, one may look at a slate-coloured sky.  But it must be
+understood that this is East End opulence we are now considering.
+Some of the people in this street are even so well-to-do as to keep
+a "slavey."  Johnny Upright keeps one, as I well know, she being my
+first acquaintance in this particular portion of the world.
+
+To Johnny Upright's house I came, and to the door came the "slavey."
+Now, mark you, her position in life was pitiable and contemptible,
+but it was with pity and contempt that she looked at me.  She
+evinced a plain desire that our conversation should be short.  It
+was Sunday, and Johnny Upright was not at home, and that was all
+there was to it.  But I lingered, discussing whether or not it was
+all there was to it, till Mrs. Johnny Upright was attracted to the
+door, where she scolded the girl for not having closed it before
+turning her attention to me.
+
+No, Mr. Johnny Upright was not at home, and further, he saw nobody
+on Sunday.  It is too bad, said I.  Was I looking for work?  No,
+quite the contrary; in fact, I had come to see Johnny Upright on
+business which might be profitable to him.
+
+A change came over the face of things at once.  The gentleman in
+question was at church, but would be home in an hour or thereabouts,
+when no doubt he could be seen.
+
+Would I kindly step in?--no, the lady did not ask me, though I
+fished for an invitation by stating that I would go down to the
+corner and wait in a public-house.  And down to the corner I went,
+but, it being church time, the "pub" was closed.  A miserable
+drizzle was falling, and, in lieu of better, I took a seat on a
+neighbourly doorstep and waited.
+
+And here to the doorstep came the "slavey," very frowzy and very
+perplexed, to tell me that the missus would let me come back and
+wait in the kitchen.
+
+"So many people come 'ere lookin' for work," Mrs. Johnny Upright
+apologetically explained.  "So I 'ope you won't feel bad the way I
+spoke."
+
+"Not at all, not at all," I replied in my grandest manner, for the
+nonce investing my rags with dignity.  "I quite understand, I assure
+you.  I suppose people looking for work almost worry you to death?"
+
+"That they do," she answered, with an eloquent and expressive
+glance; and thereupon ushered me into, not the kitchen, but the
+dining room--a favour, I took it, in recompense for my grand manner.
+
+This dining-room, on the same floor as the kitchen, was about four
+feet below the level of the ground, and so dark (it was midday) that
+I had to wait a space for my eyes to adjust themselves to the gloom.
+Dirty light filtered in through a window, the top of which was on a
+level with a sidewalk, and in this light I found that I was able to
+read newspaper print.
+
+And here, while waiting the coming of Johnny Upright, let me explain
+my errand.  While living, eating, and sleeping with the people of
+the East End, it was my intention to have a port of refuge, not too
+far distant, into which could run now and again to assure myself
+that good clothes and cleanliness still existed.  Also in such port
+I could receive my mail, work up my notes, and sally forth
+occasionally in changed garb to civilisation.
+
+But this involved a dilemma.  A lodging where my property would be
+safe implied a landlady apt to be suspicious of a gentleman leading
+a double life; while a landlady who would not bother her head over
+the double life of her lodgers would imply lodgings where property
+was unsafe.  To avoid the dilemma was what had brought me to Johnny
+Upright.  A detective of thirty-odd years' continuous service in the
+East End, known far and wide by a name given him by a convicted
+felon in the dock, he was just the man to find me an honest
+landlady, and make her rest easy concerning the strange comings and
+goings of which I might be guilty.
+
+His two daughters beat him home from church--and pretty girls they
+were in their Sunday dresses; withal it was the certain weak and
+delicate prettiness which characterises the Cockney lasses, a
+prettiness which is no more than a promise with no grip on time, and
+doomed to fade quickly away like the colour from a sunset sky.
+
+They looked me over with frank curiosity, as though I were some sort
+of a strange animal, and then ignored me utterly for the rest of my
+wait.  Then Johnny Upright himself arrived, and I was summoned
+upstairs to confer with him.
+
+"Speak loud," he interrupted my opening words.  "I've got a bad
+cold, and I can't hear well."
+
+Shades of Old Sleuth and Sherlock Holmes!  I wondered as to where
+the assistant was located whose duty it was to take down whatever
+information I might loudly vouchsafe.  And to this day, much as I
+have seen of Johnny Upright and much as I have puzzled over the
+incident, I have never been quite able to make up my mind as to
+whether or not he had a cold, or had an assistant planted in the
+other room.  But of one thing I am sure:  though I gave Johnny
+Upright the facts concerning myself and project, he withheld
+judgment till next day, when I dodged into his street conventionally
+garbed and in a hansom.  Then his greeting was cordial enough, and I
+went down into the dining-room to join the family at tea.
+
+"We are humble here," he said, "not given to the flesh, and you must
+take us for what we are, in our humble way."
+
+The girls were flushed and embarrassed at greeting me, while he did
+not make it any the easier for them.
+
+"Ha! ha!" he roared heartily, slapping the table with his open hand
+till the dishes rang.  "The girls thought yesterday you had come to
+ask for a piece of bread!  Ha! ha! ho! ho! ho!"
+
+This they indignantly denied, with snapping eyes and guilty red
+cheeks, as though it were an essential of true refinement to be able
+to discern under his rags a man who had no need to go ragged.
+
+And then, while I ate bread and marmalade, proceeded a play at cross
+purposes, the daughters deeming it an insult to me that I should
+have been mistaken for a beggar, and the father considering it as
+the highest compliment to my cleverness to succeed in being so
+mistaken.  All of which I enjoyed, and the bread, the marmalade, and
+the tea, till the time came for Johnny Upright to find me a lodging,
+which he did, not half-a-dozen doors away, in his own respectable
+and opulent street, in a house as like to his own as a pea to its
+mate.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III--MY LODGING AND SOME OTHERS
+
+
+
+From an East London standpoint, the room I rented for six shillings,
+or a dollar and a half, per week, was a most comfortable affair.
+From the American standpoint, on the other hand, it was rudely
+furnished, uncomfortable, and small.  By the time I had added an
+ordinary typewriter table to its scanty furnishing, I was hard put
+to turn around; at the best, I managed to navigate it by a sort of
+vermicular progression requiring great dexterity and presence of
+mind.
+
+Having settled myself, or my property rather, I put on my knockabout
+clothes and went out for a walk.  Lodgings being fresh in my mind, I
+began to look them up, bearing in mind the hypothesis that I was a
+poor young man with a wife and large family.
+
+My first discovery was that empty houses were few and far between--
+so far between, in fact, that though I walked miles in irregular
+circles over a large area, I still remained between.  Not one empty
+house could I find--a conclusive proof that the district was
+"saturated."
+
+It being plain that as a poor young man with a family I could rent
+no houses at all in this most undesirable region, I next looked for
+rooms, unfurnished rooms, in which I could store my wife and babies
+and chattels.  There were not many, but I found them, usually in the
+singular, for one appears to be considered sufficient for a poor
+man's family in which to cook and eat and sleep.  When I asked for
+two rooms, the sublettees looked at me very much in the manner, I
+imagine, that a certain personage looked at Oliver Twist when he
+asked for more.
+
+Not only was one room deemed sufficient for a poor man and his
+family, but I learned that many families, occupying single rooms,
+had so much space to spare as to be able to take in a lodger or two.
+When such rooms can be rented for from three to six shillings per
+week, it is a fair conclusion that a lodger with references should
+obtain floor space for, say, from eightpence to a shilling.  He may
+even be able to board with the sublettees for a few shillings more.
+This, however, I failed to inquire into--a reprehensible error on my
+part, considering that I was working on the basis of a hypothetical
+family.
+
+Not only did the houses I investigated have no bath-tubs, but I
+learned that there were no bath-tubs in all the thousands of houses
+I had seen.  Under the circumstances, with my wife and babies and a
+couple of lodgers suffering from the too great spaciousness of one
+room, taking a bath in a tin wash-basin would be an unfeasible
+undertaking.  But, it seems, the compensation comes in with the
+saving of soap, so all's well, and God's still in heaven.
+
+However, I rented no rooms, but returned to my own Johnny Upright's
+street.  What with my wife, and babies, and lodgers, and the various
+cubby-holes into which I had fitted them, my mind's eye had become
+narrow-angled, and I could not quite take in all of my own room at
+once.  The immensity of it was awe-inspiring.  Could this be the
+room I had rented for six shillings a week?  Impossible!  But my
+landlady, knocking at the door to learn if I were comfortable,
+dispelled my doubts.
+
+"Oh yes, sir," she said, in reply to a question.  "This street is
+the very last.  All the other streets were like this eight or ten
+years ago, and all the people were very respectable.  But the others
+have driven our kind out.  Those in this street are the only ones
+left.  It's shocking, sir!"
+
+And then she explained the process of saturation, by which the
+rental value of a neighbourhood went up, while its tone went down.
+
+"You see, sir, our kind are not used to crowding in the way the
+others do.  We need more room.  The others, the foreigners and
+lower-class people, can get five and six families into this house,
+where we only get one.  So they can pay more rent for the house than
+we can afford.  It IS shocking, sir; and just to think, only a few
+years ago all this neighbourhood was just as nice as it could be."
+
+I looked at her.  Here was a woman, of the finest grade of the
+English working-class, with numerous evidences of refinement, being
+slowly engulfed by that noisome and rotten tide of humanity which
+the powers that be are pouring eastward out of London Town.  Bank,
+factory, hotel, and office building must go up, and the city poor
+folk are a nomadic breed; so they migrate eastward, wave upon wave,
+saturating and degrading neighbourhood by neighbourhood, driving the
+better class of workers before them to pioneer, on the rim of the
+city, or dragging them down, if not in the first generation, surely
+in the second and third.
+
+It is only a question of months when Johnny Upright's street must
+go.  He realises it himself.
+
+"In a couple of years," he says, "my lease expires.  My landlord is
+one of our kind.  He has not put up the rent on any of his houses
+here, and this has enabled us to stay.  But any day he may sell, or
+any day he may die, which is the same thing so far as we are
+concerned.  The house is bought by a money breeder, who builds a
+sweat shop on the patch of ground at the rear where my grapevine is,
+adds to the house, and rents it a room to a family.  There you are,
+and Johnny Upright's gone!"
+
+And truly I saw Johnny Upright, and his good wife and fair
+daughters, and frowzy slavey, like so many ghosts flitting eastward
+through the gloom, the monster city roaring at their heels.
+
+But Johnny Upright is not alone in his flitting.  Far, far out, on
+the fringe of the city, live the small business men, little
+managers, and successful clerks.  They dwell in cottages and semi-
+detached villas, with bits of flower garden, and elbow room, and
+breathing space.  They inflate themselves with pride, and throw out
+their chests when they contemplate the Abyss from which they have
+escaped, and they thank God that they are not as other men.  And lo!
+down upon them comes Johnny Upright and the monster city at his
+heels.  Tenements spring up like magic, gardens are built upon,
+villas are divided and subdivided into many dwellings, and the black
+night of London settles down in a greasy pall.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV--A MAN AND THE ABYSS
+
+
+
+"I say, can you let a lodging?"
+
+These words I discharged carelessly over my shoulder at a stout and
+elderly woman, of whose fare I was partaking in a greasy coffee-
+house down near the Pool and not very far from Limehouse.
+
+"Oh yus," she answered shortly, my appearance possibly not
+approximating the standard of affluence required by her house.
+
+I said no more, consuming my rasher of bacon and pint of sickly tea
+in silence.  Nor did she take further interest in me till I came to
+pay my reckoning (fourpence), when I pulled all of ten shillings out
+of my pocket.  The expected result was produced.
+
+"Yus, sir," she at once volunteered; "I 'ave nice lodgin's you'd
+likely tyke a fancy to.  Back from a voyage, sir?"
+
+"How much for a room?" I inquired, ignoring her curiosity.
+
+She looked me up and down with frank surprise.  "I don't let rooms,
+not to my reg'lar lodgers, much less casuals."
+
+"Then I'll have to look along a bit," I said, with marked
+disappointment.
+
+But the sight of my ten shillings had made her keen.  "I can let you
+have a nice bed in with two hother men," she urged.  "Good,
+respectable men, an' steady."
+
+"But I don't want to sleep with two other men," I objected.
+
+"You don't 'ave to.  There's three beds in the room, an' hit's not a
+very small room."
+
+"How much?" I demanded.
+
+"'Arf a crown a week, two an' six, to a regular lodger.  You'll
+fancy the men, I'm sure.  One works in the ware'ouse, an' 'e's been
+with me two years now.  An' the hother's bin with me six--six years,
+sir, an' two months comin' nex' Saturday.  'E's a scene-shifter,"
+she went on.  "A steady, respectable man, never missin' a night's
+work in the time 'e's bin with me.  An' 'e likes the 'ouse; 'e says
+as it's the best 'e can do in the w'y of lodgin's.  I board 'im, an'
+the hother lodgers too."
+
+"I suppose he's saving money right along," I insinuated innocently.
+
+"Bless you, no!  Nor can 'e do as well helsewhere with 'is money."
+
+And I thought of my own spacious West, with room under its sky and
+unlimited air for a thousand Londons; and here was this man, a
+steady and reliable man, never missing a night's work, frugal and
+honest, lodging in one room with two other men, paying two dollars
+and a half per month for it, and out of his experience adjudging it
+to be the best he could do!  And here was I, on the strength of the
+ten shillings in my pocket, able to enter in with my rags and take
+up my bed with him.  The human soul is a lonely thing, but it must
+be very lonely sometimes when there are three beds to a room, and
+casuals with ten shillings are admitted.
+
+"How long have you been here?" I asked.
+
+"Thirteen years, sir; an' don't you think you'll fancy the lodgin'?"
+
+The while she talked she was shuffling ponderously about the small
+kitchen in which she cooked the food for her lodgers who were also
+boarders.  When I first entered, she had been hard at work, nor had
+she let up once throughout the conversation.  Undoubtedly she was a
+busy woman.  "Up at half-past five," "to bed the last thing at
+night," "workin' fit ter drop," thirteen years of it, and for
+reward, grey hairs, frowzy clothes, stooped shoulders, slatternly
+figure, unending toil in a foul and noisome coffee-house that faced
+on an alley ten feet between the walls, and a waterside environment
+that was ugly and sickening, to say the least.
+
+"You'll be hin hagain to 'ave a look?" she questioned wistfully, as
+I went out of the door.
+
+And as I turned and looked at her, I realized to the full the deeper
+truth underlying that very wise old maxim:  "Virtue is its own
+reward."
+
+I went back to her.  "Have you ever taken a vacation?" I asked.
+
+"Vycytion!"
+
+"A trip to the country for a couple of days, fresh air, a day off,
+you know, a rest."
+
+"Lor' lumme!" she laughed, for the first time stopping from her
+work.  "A vycytion, eh? for the likes o' me?  Just fancy, now!--Mind
+yer feet!"--this last sharply, and to me, as I stumbled over the
+rotten threshold.
+
+Down near the West India Dock I came upon a young fellow staring
+disconsolately at the muddy water.  A fireman's cap was pulled down
+across his eyes, and the fit and sag of his clothes whispered
+unmistakably of the sea.
+
+"Hello, mate," I greeted him, sparring for a beginning.  "Can you
+tell me the way to Wapping?"
+
+"Worked yer way over on a cattle boat?" he countered, fixing my
+nationality on the instant.
+
+And thereupon we entered upon a talk that extended itself to a
+public-house and a couple of pints of "arf an' arf."  This led to
+closer intimacy, so that when I brought to light all of a shilling's
+worth of coppers (ostensibly my all), and put aside sixpence for a
+bed, and sixpence for more arf an' arf, he generously proposed that
+we drink up the whole shilling.
+
+"My mate, 'e cut up rough las' night," he explained.  "An' the
+bobbies got 'm, so you can bunk in wi' me.  Wotcher say?"
+
+I said yes, and by the time we had soaked ourselves in a whole
+shilling's worth of beer, and slept the night on a miserable bed in
+a miserable den, I knew him pretty fairly for what he was.  And that
+in one respect he was representative of a large body of the lower-
+class London workman, my later experience substantiates.
+
+He was London-born, his father a fireman and a drinker before him.
+As a child, his home was the streets and the docks.  He had never
+learned to read, and had never felt the need for it--a vain and
+useless accomplishment, he held, at least for a man of his station
+in life.
+
+He had had a mother and numerous squalling brothers and sisters, all
+crammed into a couple of rooms and living on poorer and less regular
+food than he could ordinarily rustle for himself.  In fact, he never
+went home except at periods when he was unfortunate in procuring his
+own food.  Petty pilfering and begging along the streets and docks,
+a trip or two to sea as mess-boy, a few trips more as coal-trimmer,
+and then a full-fledged fireman, he had reached the top of his life.
+
+And in the course of this he had also hammered out a philosophy of
+life, an ugly and repulsive philosophy, but withal a very logical
+and sensible one from his point of view.  When I asked him what he
+lived for, he immediately answered, "Booze."  A voyage to sea (for a
+man must live and get the wherewithal), and then the paying off and
+the big drunk at the end.  After that, haphazard little drunks,
+sponged in the "pubs" from mates with a few coppers left, like
+myself, and when sponging was played out another trip to sea and a
+repetition of the beastly cycle.
+
+"But women," I suggested, when he had finished proclaiming booze the
+sole end of existence.
+
+"Wimmen!"  He thumped his pot upon the bar and orated eloquently.
+"Wimmen is a thing my edication 'as learnt me t' let alone.  It
+don't pay, matey; it don't pay.  Wot's a man like me want o' wimmen,
+eh? jest you tell me.  There was my mar, she was enough, a-bangin'
+the kids about an' makin' the ole man mis'rable when 'e come 'ome,
+w'ich was seldom, I grant.  An' fer w'y?  Becos o' mar!  She didn't
+make 'is 'ome 'appy, that was w'y.  Then, there's the other wimmen,
+'ow do they treat a pore stoker with a few shillin's in 'is
+trouseys?  A good drunk is wot 'e's got in 'is pockits, a good long
+drunk, an' the wimmen skin 'im out of his money so quick 'e ain't
+'ad 'ardly a glass.  I know.  I've 'ad my fling, an' I know wot's
+wot.  An' I tell you, where's wimmen is trouble--screechin' an'
+carryin' on, fightin', cuttin', bobbies, magistrates, an' a month's
+'ard labour back of it all, an' no pay-day when you come out."
+
+"But a wife and children," I insisted.  "A home of your own, and all
+that.  Think of it, back from a voyage, little children climbing on
+your knee, and the wife happy and smiling, and a kiss for you when
+she lays the table, and a kiss all round from the babies when they
+go to bed, and the kettle singing and the long talk afterwards of
+where you've been and what you've seen, and of her and all the
+little happenings at home while you've been away, and--"
+
+"Garn!" he cried, with a playful shove of his fist on my shoulder.
+"Wot's yer game, eh?  A missus kissin' an' kids clim'in', an' kettle
+singin', all on four poun' ten a month w'en you 'ave a ship, an'
+four nothin' w'en you 'aven't.  I'll tell you wot I'd get on four
+poun' ten--a missus rowin', kids squallin', no coal t' make the
+kettle sing, an' the kettle up the spout, that's wot I'd get.
+Enough t' make a bloke bloomin' well glad to be back t' sea.  A
+missus!  Wot for?  T' make you mis'rable?  Kids?  Jest take my
+counsel, matey, an' don't 'ave 'em.  Look at me!  I can 'ave my beer
+w'en I like, an' no blessed missus an' kids a-crying for bread.  I'm
+'appy, I am, with my beer an' mates like you, an' a good ship
+comin', an' another trip to sea.  So I say, let's 'ave another pint.
+Arf an' arf's good enough for me."
+
+Without going further with the speech of this young fellow of two-
+and-twenty, I think I have sufficiently indicated his philosophy of
+life and the underlying economic reason for it.  Home life he had
+never known.  The word "home" aroused nothing but unpleasant
+associations.  In the low wages of his father, and of other men in
+the same walk in life, he found sufficient reason for branding wife
+and children as encumbrances and causes of masculine misery.  An
+unconscious hedonist, utterly unmoral and materialistic, he sought
+the greatest possible happiness for himself, and found it in drink.
+
+A young sot; a premature wreck; physical inability to do a stoker's
+work; the gutter or the workhouse; and the end--he saw it all as
+clearly as I, but it held no terrors for him.  From the moment of
+his birth, all the forces of his environment had tended to harden
+him, and he viewed his wretched, inevitable future with a
+callousness and unconcern I could not shake.
+
+And yet he was not a bad man.  He was not inherently vicious and
+brutal.  He had normal mentality, and a more than average physique.
+His eyes were blue and round, shaded by long lashes, and wide apart.
+And there was a laugh in them, and a fund of humour behind.  The
+brow and general features were good, the mouth and lips sweet,
+though already developing a harsh twist.  The chin was weak, but not
+too weak; I have seen men sitting in the high places with weaker.
+
+His head was shapely, and so gracefully was it poised upon a perfect
+neck that I was not surprised by his body that night when he
+stripped for bed.  I have seen many men strip, in gymnasium and
+training quarters, men of good blood and upbringing, but I have
+never seen one who stripped to better advantage than this young sot
+of two-and-twenty, this young god doomed to rack and ruin in four or
+five short years, and to pass hence without posterity to receive the
+splendid heritage it was his to bequeath.
+
+It seemed sacrilege to waste such life, and yet I was forced to
+confess that he was right in not marrying on four pounds ten in
+London Town.  Just as the scene-shifter was happier in making both
+ends meet in a room shared with two other men, than he would have
+been had he packed a feeble family along with a couple of men into a
+cheaper room, and failed in making both ends meet.
+
+And day by day I became convinced that not only is it unwise, but it
+is criminal for the people of the Abyss to marry.  They are the
+stones by the builder rejected.  There is no place for them, in the
+social fabric, while all the forces of society drive them downward
+till they perish.  At the bottom of the Abyss they are feeble,
+besotted, and imbecile.  If they reproduce, the life is so cheap
+that perforce it perishes of itself.  The work of the world goes on
+above them, and they do not care to take part in it, nor are they
+able.  Moreover, the work of the world does not need them.  There
+are plenty, far fitter than they, clinging to the steep slope above,
+and struggling frantically to slide no more.
+
+In short, the London Abyss is a vast shambles.  Year by year, and
+decade after decade, rural England pours in a flood of vigorous
+strong life, that not only does not renew itself, but perishes by
+the third generation.  Competent authorities aver that the London
+workman whose parents and grand-parents were born in London is so
+remarkable a specimen that he is rarely found.
+
+Mr. A. C. Pigou has said that the aged poor, and the residuum which
+compose the "submerged tenth," constitute 71 per cent, of the
+population of London.  Which is to say that last year, and
+yesterday, and to-day, at this very moment, 450,000 of these
+creatures are dying miserably at the bottom of the social pit called
+"London."  As to how they die, I shall take an instance from this
+morning's paper.
+
+
+SELF-NEGLECT
+
+Yesterday Dr. Wynn Westcott held an inquest at Shoreditch,
+respecting the death of Elizabeth Crews, aged 77 years, of 32 East
+Street, Holborn, who died on Wednesday last.  Alice Mathieson stated
+that she was landlady of the house where deceased lived.  Witness
+last saw her alive on the previous Monday.  She lived quite alone.
+Mr. Francis Birch, relieving officer for the Holborn district,
+stated that deceased had occupied the room in question for thirty-
+five years.  When witness was called, on the 1st, he found the old
+woman in a terrible state, and the ambulance and coachman had to be
+disinfected after the removal.  Dr. Chase Fennell said death was due
+to blood-poisoning from bed-sores, due to self-neglect and filthy
+surroundings, and the jury returned a verdict to that effect.
+
+
+The most startling thing about this little incident of a woman's
+death is the smug complacency with which the officials looked upon
+it and rendered judgment.  That an old woman of seventy-seven years
+of age should die of SELF-NEGLECT is the most optimistic way
+possible of looking at it.  It was the old dead woman's fault that
+she died, and having located the responsibility, society goes
+contentedly on about its own affairs.
+
+Of the "submerged tenth" Mr. Pigou has said:  "Either through lack
+of bodily strength, or of intelligence, or of fibre, or of all
+three, they are inefficient or unwilling workers, and consequently
+unable to support themselves . . . They are often so degraded in
+intellect as to be incapable of distinguishing their right from
+their left hand, or of recognising the numbers of their own houses;
+their bodies are feeble and without stamina, their affections are
+warped, and they scarcely know what family life means."
+
+Four hundred and fifty thousand is a whole lot of people.  The young
+fireman was only one, and it took him some time to say his little
+say.  I should not like to hear them all talk at once.  I wonder if
+God hears them?
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V--THOSE ON THE EDGE
+
+
+
+My first impression of East London was naturally a general one.
+Later the details began to appear, and here and there in the chaos
+of misery I found little spots where a fair measure of happiness
+reigned--sometimes whole rows of houses in little out-of-the-way
+streets, where artisans dwell and where a rude sort of family life
+obtains.  In the evenings the men can be seen at the doors, pipes in
+their mouths and children on their knees, wives gossiping, and
+laughter and fun going on.  The content of these people is
+manifestly great, for, relative to the wretchedness that encompasses
+them, they are well off.
+
+But at the best, it is a dull, animal happiness, the content of the
+full belly.  The dominant note of their lives is materialistic.
+They are stupid and heavy, without imagination.  The Abyss seems to
+exude a stupefying atmosphere of torpor, which wraps about them and
+deadens them.  Religion passes them by.  The Unseen holds for them
+neither terror nor delight.  They are unaware of the Unseen; and the
+full belly and the evening pipe, with their regular "arf an' arf,"
+is all they demand, or dream of demanding, from existence.
+
+This would not be so bad if it were all; but it is not all.  The
+satisfied torpor in which they are sunk is the deadly inertia that
+precedes dissolution.  There is no progress, and with them not to
+progress is to fall back and into the Abyss.  In their own lives
+they may only start to fall, leaving the fall to be completed by
+their children and their children's children.  Man always gets less
+than he demands from life; and so little do they demand, that the
+less than little they get cannot save them.
+
+At the best, city life is an unnatural life for the human; but the
+city life of London is so utterly unnatural that the average workman
+or workwoman cannot stand it.  Mind and body are sapped by the
+undermining influences ceaselessly at work.  Moral and physical
+stamina are broken, and the good workman, fresh from the soil,
+becomes in the first city generation a poor workman; and by the
+second city generation, devoid of push and go and initiative, and
+actually unable physically to perform the labour his father did, he
+is well on the way to the shambles at the bottom of the Abyss.
+
+If nothing else, the air he breathes, and from which he never
+escapes, is sufficient to weaken him mentally and physically, so
+that he becomes unable to compete with the fresh virile life from
+the country hastening on to London Town to destroy and be destroyed.
+
+Leaving out the disease germs that fill the air of the East End,
+consider but the one item of smoke.  Sir William Thiselton-Dyer,
+curator of Kew Gardens, has been studying smoke deposits on
+vegetation, and, according to his calculations, no less than six
+tons of solid matter, consisting of soot and tarry hydrocarbons, are
+deposited every week on every quarter of a square mile in and about
+London.  This is equivalent to twenty-four tons per week to the
+square mile, or 1248 tons per year to the square mile.  From the
+cornice below the dome of St. Paul's Cathedral was recently taken a
+solid deposit of crystallised sulphate of lime.  This deposit had
+been formed by the action of the sulphuric acid in the atmosphere
+upon the carbonate of lime in the stone.  And this sulphuric acid in
+the atmosphere is constantly being breathed by the London workmen
+through all the days and nights of their lives.
+
+It is incontrovertible that the children grow up into rotten adults,
+without virility or stamina, a weak-kneed, narrow-chested, listless
+breed, that crumples up and goes down in the brute struggle for life
+with the invading hordes from the country.  The railway men,
+carriers, omnibus drivers, corn and timber porters, and all those
+who require physical stamina, are largely drawn from the country;
+while in the Metropolitan Police there are, roughly, 12,000 country-
+born as against 3000 London-born.
+
+So one is forced to conclude that the Abyss is literally a huge man-
+killing machine, and when I pass along the little out-of-the-way
+streets with the full-bellied artisans at the doors, I am aware of a
+greater sorrow for them than for the 450,000 lost and hopeless
+wretches dying at the bottom of the pit.  They, at least, are dying,
+that is the point; while these have yet to go through the slow and
+preliminary pangs extending through two and even three generations.
+
+And yet the quality of the life is good.  All human potentialities
+are in it.  Given proper conditions, it could live through the
+centuries, and great men, heroes and masters, spring from it and
+make the world better by having lived.
+
+I talked with a woman who was representative of that type which has
+been jerked out of its little out-of-the-way streets and has started
+on the fatal fall to the bottom.  Her husband was a fitter and a
+member of the Engineers' Union.  That he was a poor engineer was
+evidenced by his inability to get regular employment.  He did not
+have the energy and enterprise necessary to obtain or hold a steady
+position.
+
+The pair had two daughters, and the four of them lived in a couple
+of holes, called "rooms" by courtesy, for which they paid seven
+shillings per week.  They possessed no stove, managing their cooking
+on a single gas-ring in the fireplace.  Not being persons of
+property, they were unable to obtain an unlimited supply of gas; but
+a clever machine had been installed for their benefit.  By dropping
+a penny in the slot, the gas was forthcoming, and when a penny's
+worth had forthcome the supply was automatically shut off.  "A penny
+gawn in no time," she explained, "an' the cookin' not arf done!"
+
+Incipient starvation had been their portion for years.  Month in and
+month out, they had arisen from the table able and willing to eat
+more.  And when once on the downward slope, chronic innutrition is
+an important factor in sapping vitality and hastening the descent.
+
+Yet this woman was a hard worker.  From 4.30 in the morning till the
+last light at night, she said, she had toiled at making cloth dress-
+skirts, lined up and with two flounces, for seven shillings a dozen.
+Cloth dress-skirts, mark you, lined up with two flounces, for seven
+shillings a dozen!  This is equal to $1.75 per dozen, or 14.75 cents
+per skirt.
+
+The husband, in order to obtain employment, had to belong to the
+union, which collected one shilling and sixpence from him each week.
+Also, when strikes were afoot and he chanced to be working, he had
+at times been compelled to pay as high as seventeen shillings into
+the union's coffers for the relief fund.
+
+One daughter, the elder, had worked as green hand for a dressmaker,
+for one shilling and sixpence per week--37.5 cents per week, or a
+fraction over 5 cents per day.  However, when the slack season came
+she was discharged, though she had been taken on at such low pay
+with the understanding that she was to learn the trade and work up.
+After that she had been employed in a bicycle store for three years,
+for which she received five shillings per week, walking two miles to
+her work, and two back, and being fined for tardiness.
+
+As far as the man and woman were concerned, the game was played.
+They had lost handhold and foothold, and were falling into the pit.
+But what of the daughters?  Living like swine, enfeebled by chronic
+innutrition, being sapped mentally, morally, and physically, what
+chance have they to crawl up and out of the Abyss into which they
+were born falling?
+
+As I write this, and for an hour past, the air has been made hideous
+by a free-for-all, rough-and-tumble fight going on in the yard that
+is back to back with my yard.  When the first sounds reached me I
+took it for the barking and snarling of dogs, and some minutes were
+required to convince me that human beings, and women at that, could
+produce such a fearful clamour.
+
+Drunken women fighting!  It is not nice to think of; it is far worse
+to listen to.  Something like this it runs -
+
+Incoherent babble, shrieked at the top of the lungs of several
+women; a lull, in which is heard a child crying and a young girl's
+voice pleading tearfully; a woman's voice rises, harsh and grating,
+"You 'it me!  Jest you 'it me!" then, swat! challenge accepted and
+fight rages afresh.
+
+The back windows of the houses commanding the scene are lined with
+enthusiastic spectators, and the sound of blows, and of oaths that
+make one's blood run cold, are borne to my ears.  Happily, I cannot
+see the combatants.
+
+A lull; "You let that child alone!" child, evidently of few years,
+screaming in downright terror.  "Awright," repeated insistently and
+at top pitch twenty times straight running; "you'll git this rock on
+the 'ead!" and then rock evidently on the head from the shriek that
+goes up.
+
+A lull; apparently one combatant temporarily disabled and being
+resuscitated; child's voice audible again, but now sunk to a lower
+note of terror and growing exhaustion.
+
+Voices begin to go up the scale, something like this:-
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"Yes!"
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"Yes!"
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"Yes!"
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"Yes!"
+
+Sufficient affirmation on both sides, conflict again precipitated.
+One combatant gets overwhelming advantage, and follows it up from
+the way the other combatant screams bloody murder.  Bloody murder
+gurgles and dies out, undoubtedly throttled by a strangle hold.
+
+Entrance of new voices; a flank attack; strangle hold suddenly
+broken from the way bloody murder goes up half an octave higher than
+before; general hullaballoo, everybody fighting.
+
+Lull; new voice, young girl's, "I'm goin' ter tyke my mother's
+part;" dialogue, repeated about five times, "I'll do as I like,
+blankety, blank, blank!"  "I'd like ter see yer, blankety, blank,
+blank!" renewed conflict, mothers, daughters, everybody, during
+which my landlady calls her young daughter in from the back steps,
+while I wonder what will be the effect of all that she has heard
+upon her moral fibre.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI--FRYING-PAN ALLEY AND A GLIMPSE OF INFERNO
+
+
+
+Three of us walked down Mile End Road, and one was a hero.  He was a
+slender lad of nineteen, so slight and frail, in fact, that, like
+Fra Lippo Lippi, a puff of wind might double him up and turn him
+over.  He was a burning young socialist, in the first throes of
+enthusiasm and ripe for martyrdom.  As platform speaker or chairman
+he had taken an active and dangerous part in the many indoor and
+outdoor pro-Boer meetings which have vexed the serenity of Merry
+England these several years back.  Little items he had been
+imparting to me as he walked along; of being mobbed in parks and on
+tram-cars; of climbing on the platform to lead the forlorn hope,
+when brother speaker after brother speaker had been dragged down by
+the angry crowd and cruelly beaten; of a siege in a church, where he
+and three others had taken sanctuary, and where, amid flying
+missiles and the crashing of stained glass, they had fought off the
+mob till rescued by platoons of constables; of pitched and giddy
+battles on stairways, galleries, and balconies; of smashed windows,
+collapsed stairways, wrecked lecture halls, and broken heads and
+bones--and then, with a regretful sigh, he looked at me and said:
+"How I envy you big, strong men!  I'm such a little mite I can't do
+much when it comes to fighting."
+
+And I, walking head and shoulders above my two companions,
+remembered my own husky West, and the stalwart men it had been my
+custom, in turn, to envy there.  Also, as I looked at the mite of a
+youth with the heart of a lion, I thought, this is the type that on
+occasion rears barricades and shows the world that men have not
+forgotten how to die.
+
+But up spoke my other companion, a man of twenty-eight, who eked out
+a precarious existence in a sweating den.
+
+"I'm a 'earty man, I am,' he announced.  "Not like the other chaps
+at my shop, I ain't.  They consider me a fine specimen of manhood.
+W'y, d' ye know, I weigh ten stone!"
+
+I was ashamed to tell him that I weighed one hundred and seventy
+pounds, or over twelve stone, so I contented myself with taking his
+measure.  Poor, misshapen little man!  His skin an unhealthy colour,
+body gnarled and twisted out of all decency, contracted chest,
+shoulders bent prodigiously from long hours of toil, and head
+hanging heavily forward and out of place!  A "'earty man,' 'e was!"
+
+"How tall are you?"
+
+"Five foot two," he answered proudly; "an' the chaps at the shop . .
+. "
+
+"Let me see that shop," I said.
+
+The shop was idle just then, but I still desired to see it.  Passing
+Leman Street, we cut off to the left into Spitalfields, and dived
+into Frying-pan Alley.  A spawn of children cluttered the slimy
+pavement, for all the world like tadpoles just turned frogs on the
+bottom of a dry pond.  In a narrow doorway, so narrow that perforce
+we stepped over her, sat a woman with a young babe, nursing at
+breasts grossly naked and libelling all the sacredness of
+motherhood.  In the black and narrow hall behind her we waded
+through a mess of young life, and essayed an even narrower and
+fouler stairway.  Up we went, three flights, each landing two feet
+by three in area, and heaped with filth and refuse.
+
+There were seven rooms in this abomination called a house.  In six
+of the rooms, twenty-odd people, of both sexes and all ages, cooked,
+ate, slept, and worked.  In size the rooms averaged eight feet by
+eight, or possibly nine.  The seventh room we entered.  It was the
+den in which five men "sweated."  It was seven feet wide by eight
+long, and the table at which the work was performed took up the
+major portion of the space.  On this table were five lasts, and
+there was barely room for the men to stand to their work, for the
+rest of the space was heaped with cardboard, leather, bundles of
+shoe uppers, and a miscellaneous assortment of materials used in
+attaching the uppers of shoes to their soles.
+
+In the adjoining room lived a woman and six children.  In another
+vile hole lived a widow, with an only son of sixteen who was dying
+of consumption.  The woman hawked sweetmeats on the street, I was
+told, and more often failed than not to supply her son with the
+three quarts of milk he daily required.  Further, this son, weak and
+dying, did not taste meat oftener than once a week; and the kind and
+quality of this meat cannot possibly be imagined by people who have
+never watched human swine eat.
+
+"The w'y 'e coughs is somethin' terrible," volunteered my sweated
+friend, referring to the dying boy.  "We 'ear 'im 'ere, w'ile we're
+workin', an' it's terrible, I say, terrible!"
+
+And, what of the coughing and the sweetmeats, I found another menace
+added to the hostile environment of the children of the slum.
+
+My sweated friend, when work was to be had, toiled with four other
+men in his eight-by-seven room.  In the winter a lamp burned nearly
+all the day and added its fumes to the over-loaded air, which was
+breathed, and breathed, and breathed again.
+
+In good times, when there was a rush of work, this man told me that
+he could earn as high as "thirty bob a week."--Thirty shillings!
+Seven dollars and a half!
+
+"But it's only the best of us can do it," he qualified.  "An' then
+we work twelve, thirteen, and fourteen hours a day, just as fast as
+we can.  An' you should see us sweat!  Just running from us!  If you
+could see us, it'd dazzle your eyes--tacks flyin' out of mouth like
+from a machine.  Look at my mouth."
+
+I looked.  The teeth were worn down by the constant friction of the
+metallic brads, while they were coal-black and rotten.
+
+"I clean my teeth," he added, "else they'd be worse."
+
+After he had told me that the workers had to furnish their own
+tools, brads, "grindery," cardboard, rent, light, and what not, it
+was plain that his thirty bob was a diminishing quantity.
+
+"But how long does the rush season last, in which you receive this
+high wage of thirty bob?" I asked.
+
+"Four months," was the answer; and for the rest of the year, he
+informed me, they average from "half a quid" to a "quid" a week,
+which is equivalent to from two dollars and a half to five dollars.
+The present week was half gone, and he had earned four bob, or one
+dollar.  And yet I was given to understand that this was one of the
+better grades of sweating.
+
+I looked out of the window, which should have commanded the back
+yards of the neighbouring buildings.  But there were no back yards,
+or, rather, they were covered with one-storey hovels, cowsheds, in
+which people lived.  The roofs of these hovels were covered with
+deposits of filth, in some places a couple of feet deep--the
+contributions from the back windows of the second and third storeys.
+I could make out fish and meat bones, garbage, pestilential rags,
+old boots, broken earthenware, and all the general refuse of a human
+sty.
+
+"This is the last year of this trade; they're getting machines to do
+away with us," said the sweated one mournfully, as we stepped over
+the woman with the breasts grossly naked and waded anew through the
+cheap young life.
+
+We next visited the municipal dwellings erected by the London County
+Council on the site of the slums where lived Arthur Morrison's
+"Child of the Jago."  While the buildings housed more people than
+before, it was much healthier.  But the dwellings were inhabited by
+the better-class workmen and artisans.  The slum people had simply
+drifted on to crowd other slums or to form new slums.
+
+"An' now," said the sweated one, the 'earty man who worked so fast
+as to dazzle one's eyes, "I'll show you one of London's lungs.  This
+is Spitalfields Garden."  And he mouthed the word "garden" with
+scorn.
+
+The shadow of Christ's Church falls across Spitalfields Garden, and
+in the shadow of Christ's Church, at three o'clock in the afternoon,
+I saw a sight I never wish to see again.  There are no flowers in
+this garden, which is smaller than my own rose garden at home.
+Grass only grows here, and it is surrounded by a sharp-spiked iron
+fencing, as are all the parks of London Town, so that homeless men
+and women may not come in at night and sleep upon it.
+
+As we entered the garden, an old woman, between fifty and sixty,
+passed us, striding with sturdy intention if somewhat rickety
+action, with two bulky bundles, covered with sacking, slung fore and
+aft upon her.  She was a woman tramp, a houseless soul, too
+independent to drag her failing carcass through the workhouse door.
+Like the snail, she carried her home with her.  In the two sacking-
+covered bundles were her household goods, her wardrobe, linen, and
+dear feminine possessions.
+
+We went up the narrow gravelled walk.  On the benches on either side
+arrayed a mass of miserable and distorted humanity, the sight of
+which would have impelled Dore to more diabolical flights of fancy
+than he ever succeeded in achieving.  It was a welter of rags and
+filth, of all manner of loathsome skin diseases, open sores,
+bruises, grossness, indecency, leering monstrosities, and bestial
+faces.  A chill, raw wind was blowing, and these creatures huddled
+there in their rags, sleeping for the most part, or trying to sleep.
+Here were a dozen women, ranging in age from twenty years to
+seventy.  Next a babe, possibly of nine months, lying asleep, flat
+on the hard bench, with neither pillow nor covering, nor with any
+one looking after it.  Next half-a-dozen men, sleeping bolt upright
+or leaning against one another in their sleep.  In one place a
+family group, a child asleep in its sleeping mother's arms, and the
+husband (or male mate) clumsily mending a dilapidated shoe.  On
+another bench a woman trimming the frayed strips of her rags with a
+knife, and another woman, with thread and needle, sewing up rents.
+Adjoining, a man holding a sleeping woman in his arms.  Farther on,
+a man, his clothing caked with gutter mud, asleep, with head in the
+lap of a woman, not more than twenty-five years old, and also
+asleep.
+
+It was this sleeping that puzzled me.  Why were nine out of ten of
+them asleep or trying to sleep?  But it was not till afterwards that
+I learned.  IT IS A LAW OF THE POWERS THAT BE THAT THE HOMELESS
+SHALL NOT SLEEP BY NIGHT.  On the pavement, by the portico of
+Christ's Church, where the stone pillars rise toward the sky in a
+stately row, were whole rows of men lying asleep or drowsing, and
+all too deep sunk in torpor to rouse or be made curious by our
+intrusion.
+
+"A lung of London," I said; "nay, an abscess, a great putrescent
+sore."
+
+"Oh, why did you bring me here?" demanded the burning young
+socialist, his delicate face white with sickness of soul and stomach
+sickness.
+
+"Those women there," said our guide, "will sell themselves for
+thru'pence, or tu'pence, or a loaf of stale bread."
+
+He said it with a cheerful sneer.
+
+But what more he might have said I do not know, for the sick man
+cried, "For heaven's sake let us get out of this."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII--A WINNER OF THE VICTORIA CROSS
+
+
+
+I have found that it is not easy to get into the casual ward of the
+workhouse.  I have made two attempts now, and I shall shortly make a
+third.  The first time I started out at seven o'clock in the evening
+with four shillings in my pocket.  Herein I committed two errors.
+In the first place, the applicant for admission to the casual ward
+must be destitute, and as he is subjected to a rigorous search, he
+must really be destitute; and fourpence, much less four shillings,
+is sufficient affluence to disqualify him.  In the second place, I
+made the mistake of tardiness.  Seven o'clock in the evening is too
+late in the day for a pauper to get a pauper's bed.
+
+For the benefit of gently nurtured and innocent folk, let me explain
+what a ward is.  It is a building where the homeless, bedless,
+penniless man, if he be lucky, may CASUALLY rest his weary bones,
+and then work like a navvy next day to pay for it.
+
+My second attempt to break into the casual ward began more
+auspiciously.  I started in the middle of the afternoon, accompanied
+by the burning young socialist and another friend, and all I had in
+my pocket was thru'pence.  They piloted me to the Whitechapel
+Workhouse, at which I peered from around a friendly corner.  It was
+a few minutes past five in the afternoon but already a long and
+melancholy line was formed, which strung out around the corner of
+the building and out of sight.
+
+It was a most woeful picture, men and women waiting in the cold grey
+end of the day for a pauper's shelter from the night, and I confess
+it almost unnerved me.  Like the boy before the dentist's door, I
+suddenly discovered a multitude of reasons for being elsewhere.
+Some hints of the struggle going on within must have shown in my
+face, for one of my companions said, "Don't funk; you can do it."
+
+Of course I could do it, but I became aware that even thru'pence in
+my pocket was too lordly a treasure for such a throng; and, in order
+that all invidious distinctions might be removed, I emptied out the
+coppers.  Then I bade good-bye to my friends, and with my heart
+going pit-a-pat, slouched down the street and took my place at the
+end of the line.  Woeful it looked, this line of poor folk tottering
+on the steep pitch to death; how woeful it was I did not dream.
+
+Next to me stood a short, stout man.  Hale and hearty, though aged,
+strong-featured, with the tough and leathery skin produced by long
+years of sunbeat and weatherbeat, his was the unmistakable sea face
+and eyes; and at once there came to me a bit of Kipling's "Galley
+Slave":-
+
+
+"By the brand upon my shoulder, by the gall of clinging steel;
+By the welt the whips have left me, by the scars that never heal;
+By eyes grown old with staring through the sun-wash on the brine,
+I am paid in full for service . . . "
+
+
+How correct I was in my surmise, and how peculiarly appropriate the
+verse was, you shall learn.
+
+"I won't stand it much longer, I won't," he was complaining to the
+man on the other side of him.  "I'll smash a windy, a big 'un, an'
+get run in for fourteen days.  Then I'll have a good place to sleep,
+never fear, an' better grub than you get here.  Though I'd miss my
+bit of bacey"--this as an after-thought, and said regretfully and
+resignedly.
+
+"I've been out two nights now," he went on; "wet to the skin night
+before last, an' I can't stand it much longer.  I'm gettin' old, an'
+some mornin' they'll pick me up dead."
+
+He whirled with fierce passion on me:  "Don't you ever let yourself
+grow old, lad.  Die when you're young, or you'll come to this.  I'm
+tellin' you sure.  Seven an' eighty years am I, an' served my
+country like a man.  Three good-conduct stripes and the Victoria
+Cross, an' this is what I get for it.  I wish I was dead, I wish I
+was dead.  Can't come any too quick for me, I tell you."
+
+The moisture rushed into his eyes, but, before the other man could
+comfort him, he began to hum a lilting sea song as though there was
+no such thing as heartbreak in the world.
+
+Given encouragement, this is the story he told while waiting in line
+at the workhouse after two nights of exposure in the streets.
+
+As a boy he had enlisted in the British navy, and for two score
+years and more served faithfully and well.  Names, dates,
+commanders, ports, ships, engagements, and battles, rolled from his
+lips in a steady stream, but it is beyond me to remember them all,
+for it is not quite in keeping to take notes at the poorhouse door.
+He had been through the "First War in China," as he termed it; had
+enlisted with the East India Company and served ten years in India;
+was back in India again, in the English navy, at the time of the
+Mutiny; had served in the Burmese War and in the Crimea; and all
+this in addition to having fought and toiled for the English flag
+pretty well over the rest of the globe.
+
+Then the thing happened.  A little thing, it could only be traced
+back to first causes:  perhaps the lieutenant's breakfast had not
+agreed with him; or he had been up late the night before; or his
+debts were pressing; or the commander had spoken brusquely to him.
+The point is, that on this particular day the lieutenant was
+irritable.  The sailor, with others, was "setting up" the fore
+rigging.
+
+Now, mark you, the sailor had been over forty years in the navy, had
+three good-conduct stripes, and possessed the Victoria Cross for
+distinguished service in battle; so he could not have been such an
+altogether bad sort of a sailorman.  The lieutenant was irritable;
+the lieutenant called him a name--well, not a nice sort of name.  It
+referred to his mother.  When I was a boy it was our boys' code to
+fight like little demons should such an insult be given our mothers;
+and many men have died in my part of the world for calling other men
+this name.
+
+However, the lieutenant called the sailor this name.  At that moment
+it chanced the sailor had an iron lever or bar in his hands.  He
+promptly struck the lieutenant over the head with it, knocking him
+out of the rigging and overboard.
+
+And then, in the man's own words:  "I saw what I had done.  I knew
+the Regulations, and I said to myself, 'It's all up with you, Jack,
+my boy; so here goes.'  An' I jumped over after him, my mind made up
+to drown us both.  An' I'd ha' done it, too, only the pinnace from
+the flagship was just comin' alongside.  Up we came to the top, me a
+hold of him an' punchin' him.  This was what settled for me.  If I
+hadn't ben strikin' him, I could have claimed that, seein' what I
+had done, I jumped over to save him."
+
+Then came the court-martial, or whatever name a sea trial goes by.
+He recited his sentence, word for word, as though memorised and gone
+over in bitterness many times.  And here it is, for the sake of
+discipline and respect to officers not always gentlemen, the
+punishment of a man who was guilty of manhood.  To be reduced to the
+rank of ordinary seaman; to be debarred all prize-money due him; to
+forfeit all rights to pension; to resign the Victoria Cross; to be
+discharged from the navy with a good character (this being his first
+offence); to receive fifty lashes; and to serve two years in prison.
+
+"I wish I had drowned that day, I wish to God I had," he concluded,
+as the line moved up and we passed around the corner.
+
+At last the door came in sight, through which the paupers were being
+admitted in bunches.  And here I learned a surprising thing:  THIS
+BEING WEDNESDAY, NONE OF US WOULD BE RELEASED TILL FRIDAY MORNING.
+Furthermore, and oh, you tobacco users, take heed:  WE WOULD NOT BE
+PERMITTED TO TAKE IN ANY TOBACCO.  This we would have to surrender
+as we entered.  Sometimes, I was told, it was returned on leaving
+and sometimes it was destroyed.
+
+The old man-of-war's man gave me a lesson.  Opening his pouch, he
+emptied the tobacco (a pitiful quantity) into a piece of paper.
+This, snugly and flatly wrapped, went down his sock inside his shoe.
+Down went my piece of tobacco inside my sock, for forty hours
+without tobacco is a hardship all tobacco users will understand.
+
+Again and again the line moved up, and we were slowly but surely
+approaching the wicket.  At the moment we happened to be standing on
+an iron grating, and a man appearing underneath, the old sailor
+called down to him, -
+
+"How many more do they want?"
+
+"Twenty-four," came the answer.
+
+We looked ahead anxiously and counted.  Thirty-four were ahead of
+us.  Disappointment and consternation dawned upon the faces about
+me.  It is not a nice thing, hungry and penniless, to face a
+sleepless night in the streets.  But we hoped against hope, till,
+when ten stood outside the wicket, the porter turned us away.
+
+"Full up," was what he said, as he banged the door.
+
+Like a flash, for all his eighty-seven years, the old sailor was
+speeding away on the desperate chance of finding shelter elsewhere.
+I stood and debated with two other men, wise in the knowledge of
+casual wards, as to where we should go.  They decided on the Poplar
+Workhouse, three miles away, and we started off.
+
+As we rounded the corner, one of them said, "I could a' got in 'ere
+to-day.  I come by at one o'clock, an' the line was beginnin' to
+form then--pets, that's what they are.  They let 'm in, the same
+ones, night upon night."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII--THE CARTER AND THE CARPENTER
+
+
+
+The Carter, with his clean-cut face, chin beard, and shaved upper
+lip, I should have taken in the United States for anything from a
+master workman to a well-to-do farmer.  The Carpenter--well, I
+should have taken him for a carpenter.  He looked it, lean and wiry,
+with shrewd, observant eyes, and hands that had grown twisted to the
+handles of tools through forty-seven years' work at the trade.  The
+chief difficulty with these men was that they were old, and that
+their children, instead of growing up to take care of them, had
+died.  Their years had told on them, and they had been forced out of
+the whirl of industry by the younger and stronger competitors who
+had taken their places.
+
+These two men, turned away from the casual ward of Whitechapel
+Workhouse, were bound with me for Poplar Workhouse.  Not much of a
+show, they thought, but to chance it was all that remained to us.
+It was Poplar, or the streets and night.  Both men were anxious for
+a bed, for they were "about gone," as they phrased it.  The Carter,
+fifty-eight years of age, had spent the last three nights without
+shelter or sleep, while the Carpenter, sixty-five years of age, had
+been out five nights.
+
+But, O dear, soft people, full of meat and blood, with white beds
+and airy rooms waiting you each night, how can I make you know what
+it is to suffer as you would suffer if you spent a weary night on
+London's streets!  Believe me, you would think a thousand centuries
+had come and gone before the east paled into dawn; you would shiver
+till you were ready to cry aloud with the pain of each aching
+muscle; and you would marvel that you could endure so much and live.
+Should you rest upon a bench, and your tired eyes close, depend upon
+it the policeman would rouse you and gruffly order you to "move on."
+You may rest upon the bench, and benches are few and far between;
+but if rest means sleep, on you must go, dragging your tired body
+through the endless streets.  Should you, in desperate slyness, seek
+some forlorn alley or dark passageway and lie down, the omnipresent
+policeman will rout you out just the same.  It is his business to
+rout you out.  It is a law of the powers that be that you shall be
+routed out.
+
+But when the dawn came, the nightmare over, you would hale you home
+to refresh yourself, and until you died you would tell the story of
+your adventure to groups of admiring friends.  It would grow into a
+mighty story.  Your little eight-hour night would become an Odyssey
+and you a Homer.
+
+Not so with these homeless ones who walked to Poplar Workhouse with
+me.  And there are thirty-five thousand of them, men and women, in
+London Town this night.  Please don't remember it as you go to bed;
+if you are as soft as you ought to be you may not rest so well as
+usual.  But for old men of sixty, seventy, and eighty, ill-fed, with
+neither meat nor blood, to greet the dawn unrefreshed, and to
+stagger through the day in mad search for crusts, with relentless
+night rushing down upon them again, and to do this five nights and
+days--O dear, soft people, full of meat and blood, how can you ever
+understand?
+
+I walked up Mile End Road between the Carter and the Carpenter.
+Mile End Road is a wide thoroughfare, cutting the heart of East
+London, and there were tens of thousands of people abroad on it.  I
+tell you this so that you may fully appreciate what I shall describe
+in the next paragraph.  As I say, we walked along, and when they
+grew bitter and cursed the land, I cursed with them, cursed as an
+American waif would curse, stranded in a strange and terrible land.
+And, as I tried to lead them to believe, and succeeded in making
+them believe, they took me for a "seafaring man," who had spent his
+money in riotous living, lost his clothes (no unusual occurrence
+with seafaring men ashore), and was temporarily broke while looking
+for a ship.  This accounted for my ignorance of English ways in
+general and casual wards in particular, and my curiosity concerning
+the same.
+
+The Carter was hard put to keep the pace at which we walked (he told
+me that he had eaten nothing that day), but the Carpenter, lean and
+hungry, his grey and ragged overcoat flapping mournfully in the
+breeze, swung on in a long and tireless stride which reminded me
+strongly of the plains wolf or coyote.  Both kept their eyes upon
+the pavement as they walked and talked, and every now and then one
+or the other would stoop and pick something up, never missing the
+stride the while.  I thought it was cigar and cigarette stumps they
+were collecting, and for some time took no notice.  Then I did
+notice.
+
+FROM THE SLIMY, SPITTLE-DRENCHED, SIDEWALK, THEY WERE PICKING UP
+BITS OF ORANGE PEEL, APPLE SKIN, AND GRAPE STEMS, AND, THEY WERE
+EATING THEM.  THE PITS OF GREENGAGE PLUMS THEY CRACKED BETWEEN THEIR
+TEETH FOR THE KERNELS INSIDE.  THEY PICKED UP STRAY BITS OF BREAD
+THE SIZE OF PEAS, APPLE CORES SO BLACK AND DIRTY ONE WOULD NOT TAKE
+THEM TO BE APPLE CORES, AND THESE THINGS THESE TWO MEN TOOK INTO
+THEIR MOUTHS, AND CHEWED THEM, AND SWALLOWED THEM; AND THIS, BETWEEN
+SIX AND SEVEN O'CLOCK IN THE EVENING OF AUGUST 20, YEAR OF OUR LORD
+1902, IN THE HEART OF THE GREATEST, WEALTHIEST, AND MOST POWERFUL
+EMPIRE THE WORLD HAS EVER SEEN.
+
+These two men talked.  They were not fools, they were merely old.
+And, naturally, their guts a-reek with pavement offal, they talked
+of bloody revolution.  They talked as anarchists, fanatics, and
+madmen would talk.  And who shall blame them?  In spite of my three
+good meals that day, and the snug bed I could occupy if I wished,
+and my social philosophy, and my evolutionary belief in the slow
+development and metamorphosis of things--in spite of all this, I
+say, I felt impelled to talk rot with them or hold my tongue.  Poor
+fools!  Not of their sort are revolutions bred.  And when they are
+dead and dust, which will be shortly, other fools will talk bloody
+revolution as they gather offal from the spittle-drenched sidewalk
+along Mile End Road to Poplar Workhouse.
+
+Being a foreigner, and a young man, the Carter and the Carpenter
+explained things to me and advised me.  Their advice, by the way,
+was brief, and to the point; it was to get out of the country.  "As
+fast as God'll let me," I assured them; "I'll hit only the high
+places, till you won't be able to see my trail for smoke."  They
+felt the force of my figures, rather than understood them, and they
+nodded their heads approvingly.
+
+"Actually make a man a criminal against 'is will," said the
+Carpenter.  "'Ere I am, old, younger men takin' my place, my clothes
+gettin' shabbier an' shabbier, an' makin' it 'arder every day to get
+a job.  I go to the casual ward for a bed.  Must be there by two or
+three in the afternoon or I won't get in.  You saw what happened to-
+day.  What chance does that give me to look for work?  S'pose I do
+get into the casual ward?  Keep me in all day to-morrow, let me out
+mornin' o' next day.  What then?  The law sez I can't get in another
+casual ward that night less'n ten miles distant.  Have to hurry an'
+walk to be there in time that day.  What chance does that give me to
+look for a job?  S'pose I don't walk.  S'pose I look for a job?  In
+no time there's night come, an' no bed.  No sleep all night, nothin'
+to eat, what shape am I in the mornin' to look for work?  Got to
+make up my sleep in the park somehow" (the vision of Christ's
+Church, Spitalfield, was strong on me) "an' get something to eat.
+An' there I am!  Old, down, an' no chance to get up."
+
+"Used to be a toll-gate 'ere," said the Carter.  "Many's the time
+I've paid my toll 'ere in my cartin' days."
+
+"I've 'ad three 'a'penny rolls in two days," the Carpenter
+announced, after a long pause in the conversation.  "Two of them I
+ate yesterday, an' the third to-day," he concluded, after another
+long pause.
+
+"I ain't 'ad anything to-day," said the Carter.  "An' I'm fagged
+out.  My legs is hurtin' me something fearful."
+
+"The roll you get in the 'spike' is that 'ard you can't eat it
+nicely with less'n a pint of water," said the Carpenter, for my
+benefit.  And, on asking him what the "spike" was, he answered, "The
+casual ward.  It's a cant word, you know."
+
+But what surprised me was that he should have the word "cant" in his
+vocabulary, a vocabulary that I found was no mean one before we
+parted.
+
+I asked them what I might expect in the way of treatment, if we
+succeeded in getting into the Poplar Workhouse, and between them I
+was supplied with much information.  Having taken a cold bath on
+entering, I would be given for supper six ounces of bread and "three
+parts of skilly."  "Three parts" means three-quarters of a pint, and
+"skilly" is a fluid concoction of three quarts of oatmeal stirred
+into three buckets and a half of hot water.
+
+"Milk and sugar, I suppose, and a silver spoon?" I queried.
+
+"No fear.  Salt's what you'll get, an' I've seen some places where
+you'd not get any spoon.  'Old 'er up an' let 'er run down, that's
+'ow they do it."
+
+"You do get good skilly at 'Ackney," said the Carter.
+
+"Oh, wonderful skilly, that," praised the Carpenter, and each looked
+eloquently at the other.
+
+"Flour an' water at St. George's in the East," said the Carter.
+
+The Carpenter nodded.  He had tried them all.
+
+"Then what?" I demanded
+
+And I was informed that I was sent directly to bed.  "Call you at
+half after five in the mornin', an' you get up an' take a 'sluice'--
+if there's any soap.  Then breakfast, same as supper, three parts o'
+skilly an' a six-ounce loaf."
+
+"'Tisn't always six ounces," corrected the Carter.
+
+"'Tisn't, no; an' often that sour you can 'ardly eat it.  When first
+I started I couldn't eat the skilly nor the bread, but now I can eat
+my own an' another man's portion."
+
+"I could eat three other men's portions," said the Carter.  "I
+'aven't 'ad a bit this blessed day."
+
+"Then what?"
+
+"Then you've got to do your task, pick four pounds of oakum, or
+clean an' scrub, or break ten to eleven hundredweight o' stones.  I
+don't 'ave to break stones; I'm past sixty, you see.  They'll make
+you do it, though.  You're young an' strong."
+
+"What I don't like," grumbled the Carter, "is to be locked up in a
+cell to pick oakum.  It's too much like prison."
+
+"But suppose, after you've had your night's sleep, you refuse to
+pick oakum, or break stones, or do any work at all?" I asked.
+
+"No fear you'll refuse the second time; they'll run you in,"
+answered the Carpenter.  "Wouldn't advise you to try it on, my lad."
+
+"Then comes dinner," he went on.  "Eight ounces of bread, one and a
+arf ounces of cheese, an' cold water.  Then you finish your task an'
+'ave supper, same as before, three parts o' skilly any six ounces o'
+bread.  Then to bed, six o'clock, an' next mornin' you're turned
+loose, provided you've finished your task."
+
+We had long since left Mile End Road, and after traversing a gloomy
+maze of narrow, winding streets, we came to Poplar Workhouse.  On a
+low stone wall we spread our handkerchiefs, and each in his
+handkerchief put all his worldly possessions, with the exception of
+the "bit o' baccy" down his sock.  And then, as the last light was
+fading from the drab-coloured sky, the wind blowing cheerless and
+cold, we stood, with our pitiful little bundles in our hands, a
+forlorn group at the workhouse door.
+
+Three working girls came along, and one looked pityingly at me; as
+she passed I followed her with my eyes, and she still looked
+pityingly back at me.  The old men she did not notice.  Dear Christ,
+she pitied me, young and vigorous and strong, but she had no pity
+for the two old men who stood by my side!  She was a young woman,
+and I was a young man, and what vague sex promptings impelled her to
+pity me put her sentiment on the lowest plane.  Pity for old men is
+an altruistic feeling, and besides, the workhouse door is the
+accustomed place for old men.  So she showed no pity for them, only
+for me, who deserved it least or not at all.  Not in honour do grey
+hairs go down to the grave in London Town.
+
+On one side the door was a bell handle, on the other side a press
+button.
+
+"Ring the bell," said the Carter to me.
+
+And just as I ordinarily would at anybody's door, I pulled out the
+handle and rang a peal.
+
+"Oh!  Oh!" they cried in one terrified voice.  "Not so 'ard!"
+
+I let go, and they looked reproachfully at me, as though I had
+imperilled their chance for a bed and three parts of skilly.  Nobody
+came.  Luckily it was the wrong bell, and I felt better.
+
+"Press the button," I said to the Carpenter.
+
+"No, no, wait a bit," the Carter hurriedly interposed.
+
+From all of which I drew the conclusion that a poorhouse porter, who
+commonly draws a yearly salary of from seven to nine pounds, is a
+very finicky and important personage, and cannot be treated too
+fastidiously by--paupers.
+
+So we waited, ten times a decent interval, when the Carter
+stealthily advanced a timid forefinger to the button, and gave it
+the faintest, shortest possible push.  I have looked at waiting men
+where life or death was in the issue; but anxious suspense showed
+less plainly on their faces than it showed on the faces of these two
+men as they waited on the coming of the porter.
+
+He came.  He barely looked at us.  "Full up," he said and shut the
+door.
+
+"Another night of it," groaned the Carpenter.  In the dim light the
+Carter looked wan and grey.
+
+Indiscriminate charity is vicious, say the professional
+philanthropists.  Well, I resolved to be vicious.
+
+"Come on; get your knife out and come here," I said to the Carter,
+drawing him into a dark alley.
+
+He glared at me in a frightened manner, and tried to draw back.
+Possibly he took me for a latter-day Jack-the-Ripper, with a
+penchant for elderly male paupers.  Or he may have thought I was
+inveigling him into the commission of some desperate crime.  Anyway,
+he was frightened.
+
+It will be remembered, at the outset, that I sewed a pound inside my
+stoker's singlet under the armpit.  This was my emergency fund, and
+I was now called upon to use it for the first time.
+
+Not until I had gone through the acts of a contortionist, and shown
+the round coin sewed in, did I succeed in getting the Carter's help.
+Even then his hand was trembling so that I was afraid he would cut
+me instead of the stitches, and I was forced to take the knife away
+and do it myself.  Out rolled the gold piece, a fortune in their
+hungry eyes; and away we stampeded for the nearest coffee-house.
+
+Of course I had to explain to them that I was merely an
+investigator, a social student, seeking to find out how the other
+half lived.  And at once they shut up like clams.  I was not of
+their kind; my speech had changed, the tones of my voice were
+different, in short, I was a superior, and they were superbly class
+conscious.
+
+"What will you have?" I asked, as the waiter came for the order.
+
+"Two slices an' a cup of tea," meekly said the Carter.
+
+"Two slices an' a cup of tea," meekly said the Carpenter.
+
+Stop a moment, and consider the situation.  Here were two men,
+invited by me into the coffee-house.  They had seen my gold piece,
+and they could understand that I was no pauper.  One had eaten a
+ha'penny roll that day, the other had eaten nothing.  And they
+called for "two slices an' a cup of tea!"  Each man had given a
+tu'penny order.  "Two slices," by the way, means two slices of bread
+and butter.
+
+This was the same degraded humility that had characterised their
+attitude toward the poorhouse porter.  But I wouldn't have it.  Step
+by step I increased their order--eggs, rashers of bacon, more eggs,
+more bacon, more tea, more slices and so forth--they denying
+wistfully all the while that they cared for anything more, and
+devouring it ravenously as fast as it arrived.
+
+"First cup o' tea I've 'ad in a fortnight," said the Carter.
+
+"Wonderful tea, that," said the Carpenter.
+
+They each drank two pints of it, and I assure you that it was slops.
+It resembled tea less than lager beer resembles champagne.  Nay, it
+was "water-bewitched," and did not resemble tea at all.
+
+It was curious, after the first shock, to notice the effect the food
+had on them.  At first they were melancholy, and talked of the
+divers times they had contemplated suicide.  The Carter, not a week
+before, had stood on the bridge and looked at the water, and
+pondered the question.  Water, the Carpenter insisted with heat, was
+a bad route.  He, for one, he knew, would struggle.  A bullet was
+"'andier," but how under the sun was he to get hold of a revolver?
+That was the rub.
+
+They grew more cheerful as the hot "tea" soaked in, and talked more
+about themselves.  The Carter had buried his wife and children, with
+the exception of one son, who grew to manhood and helped him in his
+little business.  Then the thing happened.  The son, a man of
+thirty-one, died of the smallpox.  No sooner was this over than the
+father came down with fever and went to the hospital for three
+months.  Then he was done for.  He came out weak, debilitated, no
+strong young son to stand by him, his little business gone
+glimmering, and not a farthing.  The thing had happened, and the
+game was up.  No chance for an old man to start again.  Friends all
+poor and unable to help.  He had tried for work when they were
+putting up the stands for the first Coronation parade.  "An' I got
+fair sick of the answer:  'No! no! no!'  It rang in my ears at night
+when I tried to sleep, always the same, 'No! no! no!'"  Only the
+past week he had answered an advertisement in Hackney, and on giving
+his age was told, "Oh, too old, too old by far."
+
+The Carpenter had been born in the army, where his father had served
+twenty-two years.  Likewise, his two brothers had gone into the
+army; one, troop sergeant-major of the Seventh Hussars, dying in
+India after the Mutiny; the other, after nine years under Roberts in
+the East, had been lost in Egypt.  The Carpenter had not gone into
+the army, so here he was, still on the planet.
+
+"But 'ere, give me your 'and," he said, ripping open his ragged
+shirt.  "I'm fit for the anatomist, that's all.  I'm wastin' away,
+sir, actually wastin' away for want of food.  Feel my ribs an'
+you'll see."
+
+I put my hand under his shirt and felt.  The skin was stretched like
+parchment over the bones, and the sensation produced was for all the
+world like running one's hand over a washboard.
+
+"Seven years o' bliss I 'ad," he said.  "A good missus and three
+bonnie lassies.  But they all died.  Scarlet fever took the girls
+inside a fortnight."
+
+"After this, sir," said the Carter, indicating the spread, and
+desiring to turn the conversation into more cheerful channels;
+"after this, I wouldn't be able to eat a workhouse breakfast in the
+morning."
+
+"Nor I," agreed the Carpenter, and they fell to discussing belly
+delights and the fine dishes their respective wives had cooked in
+the old days.
+
+"I've gone three days and never broke my fast," said the Carter.
+
+"And I, five," his companion added, turning gloomy with the memory
+of it.  "Five days once, with nothing on my stomach but a bit of
+orange peel, an' outraged nature wouldn't stand it, sir, an' I near
+died.  Sometimes, walkin' the streets at night, I've ben that
+desperate I've made up my mind to win the horse or lose the saddle.
+You know what I mean, sir--to commit some big robbery.  But when
+mornin' come, there was I, too weak from 'unger an' cold to 'arm a
+mouse."
+
+As their poor vitals warmed to the food, they began to expand and
+wax boastful, and to talk politics.  I can only say that they talked
+politics as well as the average middle-class man, and a great deal
+better than some of the middle-class men I have heard.  What
+surprised me was the hold they had on the world, its geography and
+peoples, and on recent and contemporaneous history.  As I say, they
+were not fools, these two men.  They were merely old, and their
+children had undutifully failed to grow up and give them a place by
+the fire.
+
+One last incident, as I bade them good-bye on the corner, happy with
+a couple of shillings in their pockets and the certain prospect of a
+bed for the night.  Lighting a cigarette, I was about to throw away
+the burning match when the Carter reached for it.  I proffered him
+the box, but he said, "Never mind, won't waste it, sir."  And while
+he lighted the cigarette I had given him, the Carpenter hurried with
+the filling of his pipe in order to have a go at the same match.
+
+"It's wrong to waste," said he.
+
+"Yes," I said, but I was thinking of the wash-board ribs over which
+I had run my hand.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX--THE SPIKE
+
+
+
+First of all, I must beg forgiveness of my body for the vileness
+through which I have dragged it, and forgiveness of my stomach for
+the vileness which I have thrust into it.  I have been to the spike,
+and slept in the spike, and eaten in the spike; also, I have run
+away from the spike.
+
+After my two unsuccessful attempts to penetrate the Whitechapel
+casual ward, I started early, and joined the desolate line before
+three o'clock in the afternoon.  They did not "let in" till six, but
+at that early hour I was number twenty, while the news had gone
+forth that only twenty-two were to be admitted.  By four o'clock
+there were thirty-four in line, the last ten hanging on in the
+slender hope of getting in by some kind of a miracle.  Many more
+came, looked at the line, and went away, wise to the bitter fact
+that the spike would be "full up."
+
+Conversation was slack at first, standing there, till the man on one
+side of me and the man on the other side of me discovered that they
+had been in the smallpox hospital at the same time, though a full
+house of sixteen hundred patients had prevented their becoming
+acquainted.  But they made up for it, discussing and comparing the
+more loathsome features of their disease in the most cold-blooded,
+matter-of-fact way.  I learned that the average mortality was one in
+six, that one of them had been in three months and the other three
+months and a half, and that they had been "rotten wi' it."  Whereat
+my flesh began to creep and crawl, and I asked them how long they
+had been out.  One had been out two weeks, and the other three
+weeks.  Their faces were badly pitted (though each assured the other
+that this was not so), and further, they showed me in their hands
+and under the nails the smallpox "seeds" still working out.  Nay,
+one of them worked a seed out for my edification, and pop it went,
+right out of his flesh into the air.  I tried to shrink up smaller
+inside my clothes, and I registered a fervent though silent hope
+that it had not popped on me.
+
+In both instances, I found that the smallpox was the cause of their
+being "on the doss," which means on the tramp.  Both had been
+working when smitten by the disease, and both had emerged from the
+hospital "broke," with the gloomy task before them of hunting for
+work.  So far, they had not found any, and they had come to the
+spike for a "rest up" after three days and nights on the street.
+
+It seems that not only the man who becomes old is punished for his
+involuntary misfortune, but likewise the man who is struck by
+disease or accident.  Later on, I talked with another man--"Ginger"
+we called him--who stood at the head of the line--a sure indication
+that he had been waiting since one o'clock.  A year before, one day,
+while in the employ of a fish dealer, he was carrying a heavy box of
+fish which was too much for him.  Result:  "something broke," and
+there was the box on the ground, and he on the ground beside it.
+
+At the first hospital, whither he was immediately carried, they said
+it was a rupture, reduced the swelling, gave him some vaseline to
+rub on it, kept him four hours, and told him to get along.  But he
+was not on the streets more than two or three hours when he was down
+on his back again.  This time he went to another hospital and was
+patched up.  But the point is, the employer did nothing, positively
+nothing, for the man injured in his employment, and even refused him
+"a light job now and again," when he came out.  As far as Ginger is
+concerned, he is a broken man.  His only chance to earn a living was
+by heavy work.  He is now incapable of performing heavy work, and
+from now until he dies, the spike, the peg, and the streets are all
+he can look forward to in the way of food and shelter.  The thing
+happened--that is all.  He put his back under too great a load of
+fish, and his chance for happiness in life was crossed off the
+books.
+
+Several men in the line had been to the United States, and they were
+wishing that they had remained there, and were cursing themselves
+for their folly in ever having left.  England had become a prison to
+them, a prison from which there was no hope of escape.  It was
+impossible for them to get away.  They could neither scrape together
+the passage money, nor get a chance to work their passage.  The
+country was too overrun by poor devils on that "lay."
+
+I was on the seafaring-man-who-had-lost-his-clothes-and-money tack,
+and they all condoled with me and gave me much sound advice.  To sum
+it up, the advice was something like this:  To keep out of all
+places like the spike.  There was nothing good in it for me.  To
+head for the coast and bend every effort to get away on a ship.  To
+go to work, if possible, and scrape together a pound or so, with
+which I might bribe some steward or underling to give me chance to
+work my passage.  They envied me my youth and strength, which would
+sooner or later get me out of the country.  These they no longer
+possessed.  Age and English hardship had broken them, and for them
+the game was played and up.
+
+There was one, however, who was still young, and who, I am sure,
+will in the end make it out.  He had gone to the United States as a
+young fellow, and in fourteen years' residence the longest period he
+had been out of work was twelve hours.  He had saved his money,
+grown too prosperous, and returned to the mother-country.  Now he
+was standing in line at the spike.
+
+For the past two years, he told me, he had been working as a cook.
+His hours had been from 7 a.m to 10.30 p.m., and on Saturday to
+12.30 p.m.--ninety-five hours per week, for which he had received
+twenty shillings, or five dollars.
+
+"But the work and the long hours was killing me," he said, "and I
+had to chuck the job.  I had a little money saved, but I spent it
+living and looking for another place."
+
+This was his first night in the spike, and he had come in only to
+get rested.  As soon as he emerged, he intended to start for
+Bristol, a one-hundred-and-ten-mile walk, where he thought he would
+eventually get a ship for the States.
+
+But the men in the line were not all of this calibre.  Some were
+poor, wretched beasts, inarticulate and callous, but for all of
+that, in many ways very human.  I remember a carter, evidently
+returning home after the day's work, stopping his cart before us so
+that his young hopeful, who had run to meet him, could climb in.
+But the cart was big, the young hopeful little, and he failed in his
+several attempts to swarm up.  Whereupon one of the most degraded-
+looking men stepped out of the line and hoisted him in.  Now the
+virtue and the joy of this act lies in that it was service of love,
+not hire.  The carter was poor, and the man knew it; and the man was
+standing in the spike line, and the carter knew it; and the man had
+done the little act, and the carter had thanked him, even as you and
+I would have done and thanked.
+
+Another beautiful touch was that displayed by the "Hopper" and his
+"ole woman."  He had been in line about half-an-hour when the "ole
+woman" (his mate) came up to him.  She was fairly clad, for her
+class, with a weather-worn bonnet on her grey head and a sacking-
+covered bundle in her arms.  As she talked to him, he reached
+forward, caught the one stray wisp of the white hair that was flying
+wild, deftly twirled it between his fingers, and tucked it back
+properly behind her ear.  From all of which one may conclude many
+things.  He certainly liked her well enough to wish her to be neat
+and tidy.  He was proud of her, standing there in the spike line,
+and it was his desire that she should look well in the eyes of the
+other unfortunates who stood in the spike line.  But last and best,
+and underlying all these motives, it was a sturdy affection he bore
+her; for man is not prone to bother his head over neatness and
+tidiness in a woman for whom he does not care, nor is he likely to
+be proud of such a woman.
+
+And I found myself questioning why this man and his mate, hard
+workers I knew from their talk, should have to seek a pauper
+lodging.  He had pride, pride in his old woman and pride in himself.
+When I asked him what he thought I, a greenhorn, might expect to
+earn at "hopping," he sized me up, and said that it all depended.
+Plenty of people were too slow to pick hops and made a failure of
+it.  A man, to succeed, must use his head and be quick with his
+fingers, must be exceeding quick with his fingers.  Now he and his
+old woman could do very well at it, working the one bin between them
+and not going to sleep over it; but then, they had been at it for
+years.
+
+"I 'ad a mate as went down last year," spoke up a man.  "It was 'is
+fust time, but 'e come back wi' two poun' ten in 'is pockit, an' 'e
+was only gone a month."
+
+"There you are," said the Hopper, a wealth of admiration in his
+voice.  "'E was quick.  'E was jest nat'rally born to it, 'e was."
+
+Two pound ten--twelve dollars and a half--for a month's work when
+one is "jest nat'rally born to it!"  And in addition, sleeping out
+without blankets and living the Lord knows how.  There are moments
+when I am thankful that I was not "jest nat'rally born" a genius for
+anything, not even hop-picking,
+
+In the matter of getting an outfit for "the hops," the Hopper gave
+me some sterling advice, to which same give heed, you soft and
+tender people, in case you should ever be stranded in London Town.
+
+"If you ain't got tins an' cookin' things, all as you can get'll be
+bread and cheese.  No bloomin' good that!  You must 'ave 'ot tea,
+an' wegetables, an' a bit o' meat, now an' again, if you're goin' to
+do work as is work.  Cawn't do it on cold wittles.  Tell you wot you
+do, lad.  Run around in the mornin' an' look in the dust pans.
+You'll find plenty o' tins to cook in.  Fine tins, wonderful good
+some o' them.  Me an' the ole woman got ours that way."  (He pointed
+at the bundle she held, while she nodded proudly, beaming on me with
+good-nature and consciousness of success and prosperity.)  "This
+overcoat is as good as a blanket," he went on, advancing the skirt
+of it that I might feel its thickness.  "An' 'oo knows, I may find a
+blanket before long."
+
+Again the old woman nodded and beamed, this time with the dead
+certainty that he WOULD find a blanket before long.
+
+"I call it a 'oliday, 'oppin'," he concluded rapturously.  "A tidy
+way o' gettin' two or three pounds together an' fixin' up for
+winter.  The only thing I don't like"--and here was the rift within
+the lute--"is paddin' the 'oof down there."
+
+It was plain the years were telling on this energetic pair, and
+while they enjoyed the quick work with the fingers, "paddin' the
+'oof," which is walking, was beginning to bear heavily upon them.
+And I looked at their grey hairs, and ahead into the future ten
+years, and wondered how it would be with them.
+
+I noticed another man and his old woman join the line, both of them
+past fifty.  The woman, because she was a woman, was admitted into
+the spike; but he was too late, and, separated from his mate, was
+turned away to tramp the streets all night.
+
+The street on which we stood, from wall to wall, was barely twenty
+feet wide.  The sidewalks were three feet wide.  It was a residence
+street.  At least workmen and their families existed in some sort of
+fashion in the houses across from us.  And each day and every day,
+from one in the afternoon till six, our ragged spike line is the
+principal feature of the view commanded by their front doors and
+windows.  One workman sat in his door directly opposite us, taking
+his rest and a breath of air after the toil of the day.  His wife
+came to chat with him.  The doorway was too small for two, so she
+stood up.  Their babes sprawled before them.  And here was the spike
+line, less than a score of feet away--neither privacy for the
+workman, nor privacy for the pauper.  About our feet played the
+children of the neighbourhood.  To them our presence was nothing
+unusual.  We were not an intrusion.  We were as natural and ordinary
+as the brick walls and stone curbs of their environment.  They had
+been born to the sight of the spike line, and all their brief days
+they had seen it.
+
+At six o'clock the line moved up, and we were admitted in groups of
+three.  Name, age, occupation, place of birth, condition of
+destitution, and the previous night's "doss," were taken with
+lightning-like rapidity by the superintendent; and as I turned I was
+startled by a man's thrusting into my hand something that felt like
+a brick, and shouting into my ear, "any knives, matches, or
+tobacco?"  "No, sir," I lied, as lied every man who entered.  As I
+passed downstairs to the cellar, I looked at the brick in my hand,
+and saw that by doing violence to the language it might be called
+"bread."  By its weight and hardness it certainly must have been
+unleavened.
+
+The light was very dim down in the cellar, and before I knew it some
+other man had thrust a pannikin into my other hand.  Then I stumbled
+on to a still darker room, where were benches and tables and men.
+The place smelled vilely, and the sombre gloom, and the mumble of
+voices from out of the obscurity, made it seem more like some
+anteroom to the infernal regions.
+
+Most of the men were suffering from tired feet, and they prefaced
+the meal by removing their shoes and unbinding the filthy rags with
+which their feet were wrapped.  This added to the general
+noisomeness, while it took away from my appetite.
+
+In fact, I found that I had made a mistake.  I had eaten a hearty
+dinner five hours before, and to have done justice to the fare
+before me I should have fasted for a couple of days.  The pannikin
+contained skilly, three-quarters of a pint, a mixture of Indian corn
+and hot water.  The men were dipping their bread into heaps of salt
+scattered over the dirty tables.  I attempted the same, but the
+bread seemed to stick in my mouth, and I remembered the words of the
+Carpenter, "You need a pint of water to eat the bread nicely."
+
+I went over into a dark corner where I had observed other men going
+and found the water.  Then I returned and attacked the skilly.  It
+was coarse of texture, unseasoned, gross, and bitter.  This
+bitterness which lingered persistently in the mouth after the skilly
+had passed on, I found especially repulsive.  I struggled manfully,
+but was mastered by my qualms, and half-a-dozen mouthfuls of skilly
+and bread was the measure of my success.  The man beside me ate his
+own share, and mine to boot, scraped the pannikins, and looked
+hungrily for more.
+
+"I met a 'towny,' and he stood me too good a dinner," I explained.
+
+"An' I 'aven't 'ad a bite since yesterday mornin'," he replied.
+
+"How about tobacco?" I asked.  "Will the bloke bother with a fellow
+now?"
+
+"Oh no," he answered me.  "No bloomin' fear.  This is the easiest
+spike goin'.  Y'oughto see some of them.  Search you to the skin."
+
+The pannikins scraped clean, conversation began to spring up.  "This
+super'tendent 'ere is always writin' to the papers 'bout us mugs,"
+said the man on the other side of me.
+
+"What does he say?" I asked.
+
+"Oh, 'e sez we're no good, a lot o' blackguards an' scoundrels as
+won't work.  Tells all the ole tricks I've bin 'earin' for twenty
+years an' w'ich I never seen a mug ever do.  Las' thing of 'is I
+see, 'e was tellin' 'ow a mug gets out o' the spike, wi' a crust in
+'is pockit.  An' w'en 'e sees a nice ole gentleman comin' along the
+street 'e chucks the crust into the drain, an' borrows the old
+gent's stick to poke it out.  An' then the ole gent gi'es 'im a
+tanner."
+
+A roar of applause greeted the time-honoured yarn, and from
+somewhere over in the deeper darkness came another voice, orating
+angrily:
+
+"Talk o' the country bein' good for tommy [food]; I'd like to see
+it.  I jest came up from Dover, an' blessed little tommy I got.
+They won't gi' ye a drink o' water, they won't, much less tommy."
+
+"There's mugs never go out of Kent," spoke a second voice, "they
+live bloomin' fat all along."
+
+"I come through Kent," went on the first voice, still more angrily,
+"an' Gawd blimey if I see any tommy.  An' I always notices as the
+blokes as talks about 'ow much they can get, w'en they're in the
+spike can eat my share o' skilly as well as their bleedin' own."
+
+"There's chaps in London," said a man across the table from me,
+"that get all the tommy they want, an' they never think o' goin' to
+the country.  Stay in London the year 'round.  Nor do they think of
+lookin' for a kip [place to sleep], till nine or ten o'clock at
+night."
+
+A general chorus verified this statement
+
+"But they're bloomin' clever, them chaps," said an admiring voice.
+
+"Course they are," said another voice.  "But it's not the likes of
+me an' you can do it.  You got to be born to it, I say.  Them chaps
+'ave ben openin' cabs an' sellin' papers since the day they was
+born, an' their fathers an' mothers before 'em.  It's all in the
+trainin', I say, an' the likes of me an' you 'ud starve at it."
+
+This also was verified by the general chorus, and likewise the
+statement that there were "mugs as lives the twelvemonth 'round in
+the spike an' never get a blessed bit o' tommy other than spike
+skilly an' bread."
+
+"I once got arf a crown in the Stratford spike," said a new voice.
+Silence fell on the instant, and all listened to the wonderful tale.
+"There was three of us breakin' stones.  Winter-time, an' the cold
+was cruel.  T'other two said they'd be blessed if they do it, an'
+they didn't; but I kept wearin' into mine to warm up, you know.  An'
+then the guardians come, an' t'other chaps got run in for fourteen
+days, an' the guardians, w'en they see wot I'd been doin', gives me
+a tanner each, five o' them, an' turns me up."
+
+The majority of these men, nay, all of them, I found, do not like
+the spike, and only come to it when driven in.  After the "rest up"
+they are good for two or three days and nights on the streets, when
+they are driven in again for another rest.  Of course, this
+continuous hardship quickly breaks their constitutions, and they
+realise it, though only in a vague way; while it is so much the
+common run of things that they do not worry about it.
+
+"On the doss," they call vagabondage here, which corresponds to "on
+the road" in the United States.  The agreement is that kipping, or
+dossing, or sleeping, is the hardest problem they have to face,
+harder even than that of food.  The inclement weather and the harsh
+laws are mainly responsible for this, while the men themselves
+ascribe their homelessness to foreign immigration, especially of
+Polish and Russian Jews, who take their places at lower wages and
+establish the sweating system.
+
+By seven o'clock we were called away to bathe and go to bed.  We
+stripped our clothes, wrapping them up in our coats and buckling our
+belts about them, and deposited them in a heaped rack and on the
+floor--a beautiful scheme for the spread of vermin.  Then, two by
+two, we entered the bathroom.  There were two ordinary tubs, and
+this I know:  the two men preceding had washed in that water, we
+washed in the same water, and it was not changed for the two men
+that followed us.  This I know; but I am also certain that the
+twenty-two of us washed in the same water.
+
+I did no more than make a show of splashing some of this dubious
+liquid at myself, while I hastily brushed it off with a towel wet
+from the bodies of other men.  My equanimity was not restored by
+seeing the back of one poor wretch a mass of blood from attacks of
+vermin and retaliatory scratching.
+
+A shirt was handed me--which I could not help but wonder how many
+other men had worn; and with a couple of blankets under my arm I
+trudged off to the sleeping apartment.  This was a long, narrow
+room, traversed by two low iron rails.  Between these rails were
+stretched, not hammocks, but pieces of canvas, six feet long and
+less than two feet wide.  These were the beds, and they were six
+inches apart and about eight inches above the floor.  The chief
+difficulty was that the head was somewhat higher than the feet,
+which caused the body constantly to slip down.  Being slung to the
+same rails, when one man moved, no matter how slightly, the rest
+were set rocking; and whenever I dozed somebody was sure to struggle
+back to the position from which he had slipped, and arouse me again.
+
+Many hours passed before I won to sleep.  It was only seven in the
+evening, and the voices of children, in shrill outcry, playing in
+the street, continued till nearly midnight.  The smell was frightful
+and sickening, while my imagination broke loose, and my skin crept
+and crawled till I was nearly frantic.  Grunting, groaning, and
+snoring arose like the sounds emitted by some sea monster, and
+several times, afflicted by nightmare, one or another, by his
+shrieks and yells, aroused the lot of us.  Toward morning I was
+awakened by a rat or some similar animal on my breast.  In the quick
+transition from sleep to waking, before I was completely myself, I
+raised a shout to wake the dead.  At any rate, I woke the living,
+and they cursed me roundly for my lack of manners.
+
+But morning came, with a six o'clock breakfast of bread and skilly,
+which I gave away, and we were told off to our various tasks.  Some
+were set to scrubbing and cleaning, others to picking oakum, and
+eight of us were convoyed across the street to the Whitechapel
+Infirmary where we were set at scavenger work.  This was the method
+by which we paid for our skilly and canvas, and I, for one, know
+that I paid in full many times over.
+
+Though we had most revolting tasks to perform, our allotment was
+considered the best and the other men deemed themselves lucky in
+being chosen to perform it.
+
+"Don't touch it, mate, the nurse sez it's deadly," warned my working
+partner, as I held open a sack into which he was emptying a garbage
+can.
+
+It came from the sick wards, and I told him that I purposed neither
+to touch it, nor to allow it to touch me.  Nevertheless, I had to
+carry the sack, and other sacks, down five flights of stairs and
+empty them in a receptacle where the corruption was speedily
+sprinkled with strong disinfectant.
+
+Perhaps there is a wise mercy in all this.  These men of the spike,
+the peg, and the street, are encumbrances.  They are of no good or
+use to any one, nor to themselves.  They clutter the earth with
+their presence, and are better out of the way.  Broken by hardship,
+ill fed, and worse nourished, they are always the first to be struck
+down by disease, as they are likewise the quickest to die.
+
+They feel, themselves, that the forces of society tend to hurl them
+out of existence.  We were sprinkling disinfectant by the mortuary,
+when the dead waggon drove up and five bodies were packed into it.
+The conversation turned to the "white potion" and "black jack," and
+I found they were all agreed that the poor person, man or woman, who
+in the Infirmary gave too much trouble or was in a bad way, was
+"polished off."  That is to say, the incurables and the obstreperous
+were given a dose of "black jack" or the "white potion," and sent
+over the divide.  It does not matter in the least whether this be
+actually so or not.  The point is, they have the feeling that it is
+so, and they have created the language with which to express that
+feeling--"black jack" "white potion," "polishing off."
+
+At eight o'clock we went down into a cellar under the infirmary,
+where tea was brought to us, and the hospital scraps.  These were
+heaped high on a huge platter in an indescribable mess--pieces of
+bread, chunks of grease and fat pork, the burnt skin from the
+outside of roasted joints, bones, in short, all the leavings from
+the fingers and mouths of the sick ones suffering from all manner of
+diseases.  Into this mess the men plunged their hands, digging,
+pawing, turning over, examining, rejecting, and scrambling for.  It
+wasn't pretty.  Pigs couldn't have done worse.  But the poor devils
+were hungry, and they ate ravenously of the swill, and when they
+could eat no more they bundled what was left into their
+handkerchiefs and thrust it inside their shirts.
+
+"Once, w'en I was 'ere before, wot did I find out there but a 'ole
+lot of pork-ribs," said Ginger to me.  By "out there" he meant the
+place where the corruption was dumped and sprinkled with strong
+disinfectant.  "They was a prime lot, no end o' meat on 'em, an' I
+'ad 'em into my arms an' was out the gate an' down the street, a-
+lookin' for some 'un to gi' 'em to.  Couldn't see a soul, an' I was
+runnin' 'round clean crazy, the bloke runnin' after me an' thinkin'
+I was 'slingin' my 'ook' [running away].  But jest before 'e got me,
+I got a ole woman an' poked 'em into 'er apron."
+
+O Charity, O Philanthropy, descend to the spike and take a lesson
+from Ginger.  At the bottom of the Abyss he performed as purely an
+altruistic act as was ever performed outside the Abyss.  It was fine
+of Ginger, and if the old woman caught some contagion from the "no
+end o' meat" on the pork-ribs, it was still fine, though not so
+fine.  But the most salient thing in this incident, it seems to me,
+is poor Ginger, "clean crazy" at sight of so much food going to
+waste.
+
+It is the rule of the casual ward that a man who enters must stay
+two nights and a day; but I had seen sufficient for my purpose, had
+paid for my skilly and canvas, and was preparing to run for it.
+
+"Come on, let's sling it," I said to one of my mates, pointing
+toward the open gate through which the dead waggon had come.
+
+"An' get fourteen days?"
+
+"No; get away."
+
+"Aw, I come 'ere for a rest," he said complacently.  "An' another
+night's kip won't 'urt me none."
+
+They were all of this opinion, so I was forced to "sling it" alone.
+
+"You cawn't ever come back 'ere again for a doss," they warned me.
+
+"No fear," said I, with an enthusiasm they could not comprehend;
+and, dodging out the gate, I sped down the street.
+
+Straight to my room I hurried, changed my clothes, and less than an
+hour from my escape, in a Turkish bath, I was sweating out whatever
+germs and other things had penetrated my epidermis, and wishing that
+I could stand a temperature of three hundred and twenty rather than
+two hundred and twenty.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X--CARRYING THE BANNER
+
+
+
+"To carry the banner" means to walk the streets all night; and I,
+with the figurative emblem hoisted, went out to see what I could
+see.  Men and women walk the streets at night all over this great
+city, but I selected the West End, making Leicester Square my base,
+and scouting about from the Thames Embankment to Hyde Park.
+
+The rain was falling heavily when the theatres let out, and the
+brilliant throng which poured from the places of amusement was hard
+put to find cabs.  The streets were so many wild rivers of cabs,
+most of which were engaged, however; and here I saw the desperate
+attempts of ragged men and boys to get a shelter from the night by
+procuring cabs for the cabless ladies and gentlemen.  I use the word
+"desperate" advisedly, for these wretched, homeless ones were
+gambling a soaking against a bed; and most of them, I took notice,
+got the soaking and missed the bed.  Now, to go through a stormy
+night with wet clothes, and, in addition, to be ill nourished and
+not to have tasted meat for a week or a month, is about as severe a
+hardship as a man can undergo.  Well fed and well clad, I have
+travelled all day with the spirit thermometer down to seventy-four
+degrees below zero--one hundred and six degrees of frost {1}; and
+though I suffered, it was a mere nothing compared with carrying the
+banner for a night, ill fed, ill clad, and soaking wet.
+
+The streets grew very quiet and lonely after the theatre crowd had
+gone home.  Only were to be seen the ubiquitous policemen, flashing
+their dark lanterns into doorways and alleys, and men and women and
+boys taking shelter in the lee of buildings from the wind and rain.
+Piccadilly, however, was not quite so deserted.  Its pavements were
+brightened by well-dressed women without escort, and there was more
+life and action there than elsewhere, due to the process of finding
+escort.  But by three o'clock the last of them had vanished, and it
+was then indeed lonely.
+
+At half-past one the steady downpour ceased, and only showers fell
+thereafter.  The homeless folk came away from the protection of the
+buildings, and slouched up and down and everywhere, in order to rush
+up the circulation and keep warm.
+
+One old woman, between fifty and sixty, a sheer wreck, I had noticed
+earlier in the night standing in Piccadilly, not far from Leicester
+Square.  She seemed to have neither the sense nor the strength to
+get out of the rain or keep walking, but stood stupidly, whenever
+she got the chance, meditating on past days, I imagine, when life
+was young and blood was warm.  But she did not get the chance often.
+She was moved on by every policeman, and it required an average of
+six moves to send her doddering off one man's beat and on to
+another's.  By three o'clock, she had progressed as far as St. James
+Street, and as the clocks were striking four I saw her sleeping
+soundly against the iron railings of Green Park.  A brisk shower was
+falling at the time, and she must have been drenched to the skin.
+
+Now, said I, at one o'clock, to myself; consider that you are a poor
+young man, penniless, in London Town, and that to-morrow you must
+look for work.  It is necessary, therefore, that you get some sleep
+in order that you may have strength to look for work and to do work
+in case you find it.
+
+So I sat down on the stone steps of a building.  Five minutes later
+a policeman was looking at me.  My eyes were wide open, so he only
+grunted and passed on.  Ten minutes later my head was on my knees, I
+was dozing, and the same policeman was saying gruffly, "'Ere, you,
+get outa that!"
+
+I got.  And, like the old woman, I continued to get; for every time
+I dozed, a policeman was there to rout me along again.  Not long
+after, when I had given this up, I was walking with a young Londoner
+(who had been out to the colonies and wished he were out to them
+again), when I noticed an open passage leading under a building and
+disappearing in darkness.  A low iron gate barred the entrance.
+
+"Come on," I said.  "Let's climb over and get a good sleep."
+
+"Wot?" he answered, recoiling from me.  "An' get run in fer three
+months!  Blimey if I do!"
+
+Later on I was passing Hyde Park with a young boy of fourteen or
+fifteen, a most wretched-looking youth, gaunt and hollow-eyed and
+sick.
+
+"Let's go over the fence," I proposed, "and crawl into the shrubbery
+for a sleep.  The bobbies couldn't find us there."
+
+"No fear," he answered.  "There's the park guardians, and they'd run
+you in for six months."
+
+Times have changed, alas!  When I was a youngster I used to read of
+homeless boys sleeping in doorways.  Already the thing has become a
+tradition.  As a stock situation it will doubtless linger in
+literature for a century to come, but as a cold fact it has ceased
+to be.  Here are the doorways, and here are the boys, but happy
+conjunctions are no longer effected.  The doorways remain empty, and
+the boys keep awake and carry the banner.
+
+"I was down under the arches," grumbled another young fellow.  By
+"arches" he meant the shore arches where begin the bridges that span
+the Thames.  "I was down under the arches wen it was ryning its
+'ardest, an' a bobby comes in an' chyses me out.  But I come back,
+an' 'e come too.  ''Ere,' sez 'e, 'wot you doin' 'ere?'  An' out I
+goes, but I sez, 'Think I want ter pinch [steal] the bleedin'
+bridge?'"
+
+Among those who carry the banner, Green Park has the reputation of
+opening its gates earlier than the other parks, and at quarter-past
+four in the morning, I, and many more, entered Green Park.  It was
+raining again, but they were worn out with the night's walking, and
+they were down on the benches and asleep at once.  Many of the men
+stretched out full length on the dripping wet grass, and, with the
+rain falling steadily upon them, were sleeping the sleep of
+exhaustion.
+
+And now I wish to criticise the powers that be.  They ARE the
+powers, therefore they may decree whatever they please; so I make
+bold only to criticise the ridiculousness of their decrees.  All
+night long they make the homeless ones walk up and down.  They drive
+them out of doors and passages, and lock them out of the parks.  The
+evident intention of all this is to deprive them of sleep.  Well and
+good, the powers have the power to deprive them of sleep, or of
+anything else for that matter; but why under the sun do they open
+the gates of the parks at five o'clock in the morning and let the
+homeless ones go inside and sleep?  If it is their intention to
+deprive them of sleep, why do they let them sleep after five in the
+morning?  And if it is not their intention to deprive them of sleep,
+why don't they let them sleep earlier in the night?
+
+In this connection, I will say that I came by Green Park that same
+day, at one in the afternoon, and that I counted scores of the
+ragged wretches asleep in the grass.  It was Sunday afternoon, the
+sun was fitfully appearing, and the well-dressed West Enders, with
+their wives and progeny, were out by thousands, taking the air.  It
+was not a pleasant sight for them, those horrible, unkempt, sleeping
+vagabonds; while the vagabonds themselves, I know, would rather have
+done their sleeping the night before.
+
+And so, dear soft people, should you ever visit London Town, and see
+these men asleep on the benches and in the grass, please do not
+think they are lazy creatures, preferring sleep to work.  Know that
+the powers that be have kept them walking all the night long, and
+that in the day they have nowhere else to sleep.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI--THE PEG
+
+
+
+But, after carrying the banner all night, I did not sleep in Green
+Park when morning dawned.  I was wet to the skin, it is true, and I
+had had no sleep for twenty-four hours; but, still adventuring as a
+penniless man looking for work, I had to look about me, first for a
+breakfast, and next for the work.
+
+During the night I had heard of a place over on the Surrey side of
+the Thames, where the Salvation Army every Sunday morning gave away
+a breakfast to the unwashed.  (And, by the way, the men who carry
+the banner are unwashed in the morning, and unless it is raining
+they do not have much show for a wash, either.)  This, thought I, is
+the very thing--breakfast in the morning, and then the whole day in
+which to look for work.
+
+It was a weary walk.  Down St. James Street I dragged my tired legs,
+along Pall Mall, past Trafalgar Square, to the Strand.  I crossed
+the Waterloo Bridge to the Surrey side, cut across to Blackfriars
+Road, coming out near the Surrey Theatre, and arrived at the
+Salvation Army barracks before seven o'clock.  This was "the peg."
+And by "the peg," in the argot, is meant the place where a free meal
+may be obtained.
+
+Here was a motley crowd of woebegone wretches who had spent the
+night in the rain.  Such prodigious misery! and so much of it!  Old
+men, young men, all manner of men, and boys to boot, and all manner
+of boys.  Some were drowsing standing up; half a score of them were
+stretched out on the stone steps in most painful postures, all of
+them sound asleep, the skin of their bodies showing red through the
+holes, and rents in their rags.  And up and down the street and
+across the street for a block either way, each doorstep had from two
+to three occupants, all asleep, their heads bent forward on their
+knees.  And, it must be remembered, these are not hard times in
+England.  Things are going on very much as they ordinarily do, and
+times are neither hard nor easy.
+
+And then came the policeman.  "Get outa that, you bloomin' swine!
+Eigh! eigh!  Get out now!"  And like swine he drove them from the
+doorways and scattered them to the four winds of Surrey.  But when
+he encountered the crowd asleep on the steps he was astounded.
+"Shocking!" he exclaimed.  "Shocking!  And of a Sunday morning!  A
+pretty sight!  Eigh! eigh!  Get outa that, you bleeding nuisances!"
+
+Of course it was a shocking sight, I was shocked myself.  And I
+should not care to have my own daughter pollute her eyes with such a
+sight, or come within half a mile of it; but--and there we were, and
+there you are, and "but" is all that can be said.
+
+The policeman passed on, and back we clustered, like flies around a
+honey jar.  For was there not that wonderful thing, a breakfast,
+awaiting us?  We could not have clustered more persistently and
+desperately had they been giving away million-dollar bank-notes.
+Some were already off to sleep, when back came the policeman and
+away we scattered only to return again as soon as the coast was
+clear.
+
+At half-past seven a little door opened, and a Salvation Army
+soldier stuck out his head.  "Ayn't no sense blockin' the wy up that
+wy," he said.  "Those as 'as tickets cawn come hin now, an' those as
+'asn't cawn't come hin till nine."
+
+Oh, that breakfast!  Nine o'clock!  An hour and a half longer!  The
+men who held tickets were greatly envied.  They were permitted to go
+inside, have a wash, and sit down and rest until breakfast, while we
+waited for the same breakfast on the street.  The tickets had been
+distributed the previous night on the streets and along the
+Embankment, and the possession of them was not a matter of merit,
+but of chance.
+
+At eight-thirty, more men with tickets were admitted, and by nine
+the little gate was opened to us.  We crushed through somehow, and
+found ourselves packed in a courtyard like sardines.  On more
+occasions than one, as a Yankee tramp in Yankeeland, I have had to
+work for my breakfast; but for no breakfast did I ever work so hard
+as for this one.  For over two hours I had waited outside, and for
+over another hour I waited in this packed courtyard.  I had had
+nothing to eat all night, and I was weak and faint, while the smell
+of the soiled clothes and unwashed bodies, steaming from pent animal
+heat, and blocked solidly about me, nearly turned my stomach.  So
+tightly were we packed, that a number of the men took advantage of
+the opportunity and went soundly asleep standing up.
+
+Now, about the Salvation Army in general I know nothing, and
+whatever criticism I shall make here is of that particular portion
+of the Salvation Army which does business on Blackfriars Road near
+the Surrey Theatre.  In the first place, this forcing of men who
+have been up all night to stand on their feet for hours longer, is
+as cruel as it is needless.  We were weak, famished, and exhausted
+from our night's hardship and lack of sleep, and yet there we stood,
+and stood, and stood, without rhyme or reason.
+
+Sailors were very plentiful in this crowd.  It seemed to me that one
+man in four was looking for a ship, and I found at least a dozen of
+them to be American sailors.  In accounting for their being "on the
+beach," I received the same story from each and all, and from my
+knowledge of sea affairs this story rang true.  English ships sign
+their sailors for the voyage, which means the round trip, sometimes
+lasting as long as three years; and they cannot sign off and receive
+their discharges until they reach the home port, which is England.
+Their wages are low, their food is bad, and their treatment worse.
+Very often they are really forced by their captains to desert in the
+New World or the colonies, leaving a handsome sum of wages behind
+them--a distinct gain, either to the captain or the owners, or to
+both.  But whether for this reason alone or not, it is a fact that
+large numbers of them desert.  Then, for the home voyage, the ship
+engages whatever sailors it can find on the beach.  These men are
+engaged at the somewhat higher wages that obtain in other portions
+of the world, under the agreement that they shall sign off on
+reaching England.  The reason for this is obvious; for it would be
+poor business policy to sign them for any longer time, since
+seamen's wages are low in England, and England is always crowded
+with sailormen on the beach.  So this fully accounted for the
+American seamen at the Salvation Army barracks.  To get off the
+beach in other outlandish places they had come to England, and gone
+on the beach in the most outlandish place of all.
+
+There were fully a score of Americans in the crowd, the non-sailors
+being "tramps royal," the men whose "mate is the wind that tramps
+the world."  They were all cheerful, facing things with the pluck
+which is their chief characteristic and which seems never to desert
+them, withal they were cursing the country with lurid metaphors
+quite refreshing after a month of unimaginative, monotonous Cockney
+swearing.  The Cockney has one oath, and one oath only, the most
+indecent in the language, which he uses on any and every occasion.
+Far different is the luminous and varied Western swearing, which
+runs to blasphemy rather than indecency.  And after all, since men
+will swear, I think I prefer blasphemy to indecency; there is an
+audacity about it, an adventurousness and defiance that is better
+than sheer filthiness.
+
+There was one American tramp royal whom I found particularly
+enjoyable.  I first noticed him on the street, asleep in a doorway,
+his head on his knees, but a hat on his head that one does not meet
+this side of the Western Ocean.  When the policeman routed him out,
+he got up slowly and deliberately, looked at the policeman, yawned
+and stretched himself, looked at the policeman again as much as to
+say he didn't know whether he would or wouldn't, and then sauntered
+leisurely down the sidewalk.  At the outset I was sure of the hat,
+but this made me sure of the wearer of the hat.
+
+In the jam inside I found myself alongside of him, and we had quite
+a chat.  He had been through Spain, Italy, Switzerland, and France,
+and had accomplished the practically impossible feat of beating his
+way three hundred miles on a French railway without being caught at
+the finish.  Where was I hanging out? he asked.  And how did I
+manage for "kipping"?--which means sleeping.  Did I know the rounds
+yet?  He was getting on, though the country was "horstyl" and the
+cities were "bum."  Fierce, wasn't it?  Couldn't "batter" (beg)
+anywhere without being "pinched."  But he wasn't going to quit it.
+Buffalo Bill's Show was coming over soon, and a man who could drive
+eight horses was sure of a job any time.  These mugs over here
+didn't know beans about driving anything more than a span.  What was
+the matter with me hanging on and waiting for Buffalo Bill?  He was
+sure I could ring in somehow.
+
+And so, after all, blood is thicker than water.  We were fellow-
+countrymen and strangers in a strange land.  I had warmed to his
+battered old hat at sight of it, and he was as solicitous for my
+welfare as if we were blood brothers.  We swapped all manner of
+useful information concerning the country and the ways of its
+people, methods by which to obtain food and shelter and what not,
+and we parted genuinely sorry at having to say good-bye.
+
+One thing particularly conspicuous in this crowd was the shortness
+of stature.  I, who am but of medium height, looked over the heads
+of nine out of ten.  The natives were all short, as were the foreign
+sailors.  There were only five or six in the crowd who could be
+called fairly tall, and they were Scandinavians and Americans.  The
+tallest man there, however, was an exception.  He was an Englishman,
+though not a Londoner.  "Candidate for the Life Guards," I remarked
+to him.  "You've hit it, mate," was his reply; "I've served my bit
+in that same, and the way things are I'll be back at it before
+long."
+
+For an hour we stood quietly in this packed courtyard.  Then the men
+began to grow restless.  There was pushing and shoving forward, and
+a mild hubbub of voices.  Nothing rough, however, nor violent;
+merely the restlessness of weary and hungry men.  At this juncture
+forth came the adjutant.  I did not like him.  His eyes were not
+good.  There was nothing of the lowly Galilean about him, but a
+great deal of the centurion who said:  "For I am a man in authority,
+having soldiers under me; and I say to this man, Go, and he goeth;
+and to another, Come, and he cometh; and to my servant, Do this, and
+he doeth it."
+
+Well, he looked at us in just that way, and those nearest to him
+quailed.  Then he lifted his voice.
+
+"Stop this 'ere, now, or I'll turn you the other wy an' march you
+out, an' you'll get no breakfast."
+
+I cannot convey by printed speech the insufferable way in which he
+said this.  He seemed to me to revel in that he was a man in
+authority, able to say to half a thousand ragged wretches, "you may
+eat or go hungry, as I elect."
+
+To deny us our breakfast after standing for hours!  It was an awful
+threat, and the pitiful, abject silence which instantly fell
+attested its awfulness.  And it was a cowardly threat.  We could not
+strike back, for we were starving; and it is the way of the world
+that when one man feeds another he is that man's master.  But the
+centurion--I mean the adjutant--was not satisfied.  In the dead
+silence he raised his voice again, and repeated the threat, and
+amplified it.
+
+At last we were permitted to enter the feasting hall, where we found
+the "ticket men" washed but unfed.  All told, there must have been
+nearly seven hundred of us who sat down--not to meat or bread, but
+to speech, song, and prayer.  From all of which I am convinced that
+Tantalus suffers in many guises this side of the infernal regions.
+The adjutant made the prayer, but I did not take note of it, being
+too engrossed with the massed picture of misery before me.  But the
+speech ran something like this:  "You will feast in Paradise.  No
+matter how you starve and suffer here, you will feast in Paradise,
+that is, if you will follow the directions."  And so forth and so
+forth.  A clever bit of propaganda, I took it, but rendered of no
+avail for two reasons.  First, the men who received it were
+unimaginative and materialistic, unaware of the existence of any
+Unseen, and too inured to hell on earth to be frightened by hell to
+come.  And second, weary and exhausted from the night's
+sleeplessness and hardship, suffering from the long wait upon their
+feet, and faint from hunger, they were yearning, not for salvation,
+but for grub.  The "soul-snatchers" (as these men call all religious
+propagandists), should study the physiological basis of psychology a
+little, if they wish to make their efforts more effective.
+
+All in good time, about eleven o'clock, breakfast arrived.  It
+arrived, not on plates, but in paper parcels.  I did not have all I
+wanted, and I am sure that no man there had all he wanted, or half
+of what he wanted or needed.  I gave part of my bread to the tramp
+royal who was waiting for Buffalo Bill, and he was as ravenous at
+the end as he was in the beginning.  This is the breakfast:  two
+slices of bread, one small piece of bread with raisins in it and
+called "cake," a wafer of cheese, and a mug of "water bewitched."
+Numbers of the men had been waiting since five o'clock for it, while
+all of us had waited at least four hours; and in addition, we had
+been herded like swine, packed like sardines, and treated like curs,
+and been preached at, and sung to, and prayed for.  Nor was that
+all.
+
+No sooner was breakfast over (and it was over almost as quickly as
+it takes to tell), than the tired heads began to nod and droop, and
+in five minutes half of us were sound asleep.  There were no signs
+of our being dismissed, while there were unmistakable signs of
+preparation for a meeting.  I looked at a small clock hanging on the
+wall.  It indicated twenty-five minutes to twelve.  Heigh-ho,
+thought I, time is flying, and I have yet to look for work.
+
+"I want to go," I said to a couple of waking men near me.
+
+"Got ter sty fer the service," was the answer.
+
+"Do you want to stay?" I asked.
+
+They shook their heads.
+
+"Then let us go and tell them we want to get out," I continued.
+"Come on."
+
+But the poor creatures were aghast.  So I left them to their fate,
+and went up to the nearest Salvation Army man.
+
+"I want to go," I said.  "I came here for breakfast in order that I
+might be in shape to look for work.  I didn't think it would take so
+long to get breakfast.  I think I have a chance for work in Stepney,
+and the sooner I start, the better chance I'll have of getting it."
+
+He was really a good fellow, though he was startled by my request.
+"Wy," he said, "we're goin' to 'old services, and you'd better sty."
+
+"But that will spoil my chances for work," I urged.  "And work is
+the most important thing for me just now."
+
+As he was only a private, he referred me to the adjutant, and to the
+adjutant I repeated my reasons for wishing to go, and politely
+requested that he let me go.
+
+"But it cawn't be done," he said, waxing virtuously indignant at
+such ingratitude.  "The idea!" he snorted.  "The idea!"
+
+"Do you mean to say that I can't get out of here?" I demanded.
+"That you will keep me here against my will?"
+
+"Yes," he snorted.
+
+I do not know what might have happened, for I was waxing indignant
+myself; but the "congregation" had "piped" the situation, and he
+drew me over to a corner of the room, and then into another room.
+Here he again demanded my reasons for wishing to go.
+
+"I want to go," I said, "because I wish to look for work over in
+Stepney, and every hour lessens my chance of finding work.  It is
+now twenty-five minutes to twelve.  I did not think when I came in
+that it would take so long to get a breakfast."
+
+"You 'ave business, eh?" he sneered.  "A man of business you are,
+eh?  Then wot did you come 'ere for?"
+
+"I was out all night, and I needed a breakfast in order to
+strengthen me to find work.  That is why I came here."
+
+"A nice thing to do," he went on in the same sneering manner.  "A
+man with business shouldn't come 'ere.  You've tyken some poor man's
+breakfast 'ere this morning, that's wot you've done."
+
+Which was a lie, for every mother's son of us had come in.
+
+Now I submit, was this Christian-like, or even honest?--after I had
+plainly stated that I was homeless and hungry, and that I wished to
+look for work, for him to call my looking for work "business," to
+call me therefore a business man, and to draw the corollary that a
+man of business, and well off, did not require a charity breakfast,
+and that by taking a charity breakfast I had robbed some hungry waif
+who was not a man of business.
+
+I kept my temper, but I went over the facts again, and clearly and
+concisely demonstrated to him how unjust he was and how he had
+perverted the facts.  As I manifested no signs of backing down (and
+I am sure my eyes were beginning to snap), he led me to the rear of
+the building where, in an open court, stood a tent.  In the same
+sneering tone he informed a couple of privates standing there that
+"'ere is a fellow that 'as business an' 'e wants to go before
+services."
+
+They were duly shocked, of course, and they looked unutterable
+horror while he went into the tent and brought out the major.  Still
+in the same sneering manner, laying particular stress on the
+"business," he brought my case before the commanding officer.  The
+major was of a different stamp of man.  I liked him as soon as I saw
+him, and to him I stated my case in the same fashion m before.
+
+"Didn't you know you had to stay for services?" he asked.
+
+"Certainly not," I answered, "or I should have gone without my
+breakfast.  You have no placards posted to that effect, nor was I so
+informed when I entered the place."
+
+He meditated a moment.  "You can go," he said.
+
+It was twelve o'clock when I gained the street, and I couldn't quite
+make up my mind whether I had been in the army or in prison.  The
+day was half gone, and it was a far fetch to Stepney.  And besides,
+it was Sunday, and why should even a starving man look for work on
+Sunday?  Furthermore, it was my judgment that I had done a hard
+night's work walking the streets, and a hard day's work getting my
+breakfast; so I disconnected myself from my working hypothesis of a
+starving young man in search of employment, hailed a bus, and
+climbed aboard.
+
+After a shave and a bath, with my clothes all off, I got in between
+clean white sheets and went to sleep.  It was six in the evening
+when I closed my eyes.  When they opened again, the clocks were
+striking nine next morning.  I had slept fifteen straight hours.
+And as I lay there drowsily, my mind went back to the seven hundred
+unfortunates I had left waiting for services.  No bath, no shave for
+them, no clean white sheets and all clothes off, and fifteen hours'
+straight sleep.  Services over, it was the weary streets again, the
+problem of a crust of bread ere night, and the long sleepless night
+in the streets, and the pondering of the problem of how to obtain a
+crust at dawn.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII--CORONATION DAY
+
+
+
+O thou that sea-walls sever
+From lands unwalled by seas!
+Wilt thou endure forever,
+O Milton's England, these?
+Thou that wast his Republic,
+Wilt thou clasp their knees?
+These royalties rust-eaten,
+These worm-corroded lies
+That keep thy head storm-beaten,
+And sun-like strength of eyes
+From the open air and heaven
+Of intercepted skies!
+
+- SWINBURNE.
+
+
+
+Vivat Rex Eduardus!  They crowned a king this day, and there has
+been great rejoicing and elaborate tomfoolery, and I am perplexed
+and saddened.  I never saw anything to compare with the pageant,
+except Yankee circuses and Alhambra ballets; nor did I ever see
+anything so hopeless and so tragic.
+
+To have enjoyed the Coronation procession, I should have come
+straight from America to the Hotel Cecil, and straight from the
+Hotel Cecil to a five-guinea seat among the washed.  My mistake was
+in coming from the unwashed of the East End.  There were not many
+who came from that quarter.  The East End, as a whole, remained in
+the East End and got drunk.  The Socialists, Democrats, and
+Republicans went off to the country for a breath of fresh air, quite
+unaffected by the fact that four hundred millions of people were
+taking to themselves a crowned and anointed ruler.  Six thousand
+five hundred prelates, priests, statesmen, princes, and warriors
+beheld the crowning and anointing, and the rest of us the pageant as
+it passed.
+
+I saw it at Trafalgar Square, "the most splendid site in Europe,"
+and the very innermost heart of the empire.  There were many
+thousands of us, all checked and held in order by a superb display
+of armed power.  The line of march was double-walled with soldiers.
+The base of the Nelson Column was triple-fringed with bluejackets.
+Eastward, at the entrance to the square, stood the Royal Marine
+Artillery.  In the triangle of Pall Mall and Cockspur Street, the
+statue of George III. was buttressed on either side by the Lancers
+and Hussars.  To the west were the red-coats of the Royal Marines,
+and from the Union Club to the embouchure of Whitehall swept the
+glittering, massive curve of the 1st Life Guards--gigantic men
+mounted on gigantic chargers, steel-breastplated, steel-helmeted,
+steel-caparisoned, a great war-sword of steel ready to the hand of
+the powers that be.  And further, throughout the crowd, were flung
+long lines of the Metropolitan Constabulary, while in the rear were
+the reserves--tall, well-fed men, with weapons to wield and muscles
+to wield them in ease of need.
+
+And as it was thus at Trafalgar Square, so was it along the whole
+line of march--force, overpowering force; myriads of men, splendid
+men, the pick of the people, whose sole function in life is blindly
+to obey, and blindly to kill and destroy and stamp out life.  And
+that they should be well fed, well clothed, and well armed, and have
+ships to hurl them to the ends of the earth, the East End of London,
+and the "East End" of all England, toils and rots and dies.
+
+There is a Chinese proverb that if one man lives in laziness another
+will die of hunger; and Montesquieu has said, "The fact that many
+men are occupied in making clothes for one individual is the cause
+of there being many people without clothes."  So one explains the
+other.  We cannot understand the starved and runty {2} toiler of the
+East End (living with his family in a one-room den, and letting out
+the floor space for lodgings to other starved and runty toilers)
+till we look at the strapping Life Guardsmen of the West End, and
+come to know that the one must feed and clothe and groom the other.
+
+And while in Westminster Abbey the people were taking unto
+themselves a king, I, jammed between the Life Guards and
+Constabulary of Trafalgar Square, was dwelling upon the time when
+the people of Israel first took unto themselves a king.  You all
+know how it runs.  The elders came to the prophet Samuel, and said:
+"Make us a king to judge us like all the nations."
+
+
+And the Lord said unto Samuel:  Now therefore hearken unto their
+voice; howbeit thou shalt show them the manner of the king that
+shall reign over them.
+
+And Samuel told all the words of the Lord unto the people that asked
+of him a king, and he said:
+
+This will be the manner of the king that shall reign over you; he
+will take your sons, and appoint them unto him, for his chariots,
+and to be his horsemen, and they shall run before his chariots.
+
+And he will appoint them unto him for captains of thousands, and
+captains of fifties; and he will set some to plough his ground, and
+to reap his harvest, and to make his instruments of war, and the
+instruments of his chariots.
+
+And he will take your daughters to be confectionaries, and to be
+cooks, and to be bakers.
+
+And he will take your fields and your vineyards, and your
+oliveyards, even the best of them, and give them to his servants.
+
+And he will take a tenth of your seed, and of your vineyards, and
+give to his officers, and to his servants.
+
+And he will take your menservants, and your maidservants, and your
+goodliest young men, and your asses, and put them to his work.
+
+He will take a tenth of your flocks; and ye shall be his servants.
+
+And ye shall call out in that day because of your king which ye
+shall have chosen you; and the Lord will not answer you in that day.
+
+
+All of which came to pass in that ancient day, and they did cry out
+to Samuel, saying:  "Pray for thy servants unto the Lord thy God,
+that we die not; for we have added unto all our sins this evil, to
+ask us a king."  And after Saul, David, and Solomon, came Rehoboam,
+who "answered the people roughly, saying:  My father made your yoke
+heavy, but I will add to your yoke; my father chastised you with
+whips, but I will chastise you with scorpions."
+
+And in these latter days, five hundred hereditary peers own one-
+fifth of England; and they, and the officers and servants under the
+King, and those who go to compose the powers that be, yearly spend
+in wasteful luxury $1,850,000,000, or 370,000,000 pounds, which is
+thirty-two per cent. of the total wealth produced by all the toilers
+of the country.
+
+At the Abbey, clad in wonderful golden raiment, amid fanfare of
+trumpets and throbbing of music, surrounded by a brilliant throng of
+masters, lords, and rulers, the King was being invested with the
+insignia of his sovereignty.  The spurs were placed to his heels by
+the Lord Great Chamberlain, and a sword of state, in purple
+scabbard, was presented him by the Archbishop of Canterbury, with
+these words:-
+
+
+Receive this kingly sword brought now from the altar of God, and
+delivered to you by the hands of the bishops and servants of God,
+though unworthy.
+
+
+Whereupon, being girded, he gave heed to the Archbishop's
+exhortation:-
+
+
+With this sword do justice, stop the growth of iniquity, protect the
+Holy Church of God, help and defend widows and orphans, restore the
+things that are gone to decay, maintain the things that are
+restored, punish and reform what is amiss, and confirm what is in
+good order.
+
+
+But hark!  There is cheering down Whitehall; the crowd sways, the
+double walls of soldiers come to attention, and into view swing the
+King's watermen, in fantastic mediaeval garbs of red, for all the
+world like the van of a circus parade.  Then a royal carriage,
+filled with ladies and gentlemen of the household, with powdered
+footmen and coachmen most gorgeously arrayed.  More carriages,
+lords, and chamberlains, viscounts, mistresses of the robes--lackeys
+all.  Then the warriors, a kingly escort, generals, bronzed and
+worn, from the ends of the earth come up to London Town, volunteer
+officers, officers of the militia and regular forces; Spens and
+Plumer, Broadwood and Cooper who relieved Ookiep, Mathias of Dargai,
+Dixon of Vlakfontein; General Gaselee and Admiral Seymour of China;
+Kitchener of Khartoum; Lord Roberts of India and all the world--the
+fighting men of England, masters of destruction, engineers of death!
+Another race of men from those of the shops and slums, a totally
+different race of men.
+
+But here they come, in all the pomp and certitude of power, and
+still they come, these men of steel, these war lords and world
+harnessers.  Pell-mell, peers and commoners, princes and maharajahs,
+Equerries to the King and Yeomen of the Guard.  And here the
+colonials, lithe and hardy men; and here all the breeds of all the
+world-soldiers from Canada, Australia, New Zealand; from Bermuda,
+Borneo, Fiji, and the Gold Coast; from Rhodesia, Cape Colony, Natal,
+Sierra Leone and Gambia, Nigeria, and Uganda; from Ceylon, Cyprus,
+Hong-Kong, Jamaica, and Wei-Hai-Wei; from Lagos, Malta, St. Lucia,
+Singapore, Trinidad.  And here the conquered men of Ind, swarthy
+horsemen and sword wielders, fiercely barbaric, blazing in crimson
+and scarlet, Sikhs, Rajputs, Burmese, province by province, and
+caste by caste.
+
+And now the Horse Guards, a glimpse of beautiful cream ponies, and a
+golden panoply, a hurricane of cheers, the crashing of bands--"The
+King! the King!  God save the King!"  Everybody has gone mad.  The
+contagion is sweeping me off my feet--I, too, want to shout, "The
+King!  God save the King!"  Ragged men about me, tears in their
+eyes, are tossing up their hats and crying ecstatically, "Bless 'em!
+Bless 'em!  Bless 'em!"  See, there he is, in that wondrous golden
+coach, the great crown flashing on his head, the woman in white
+beside him likewise crowned.
+
+And I check myself with a rush, striving to convince myself that it
+is all real and rational, and not some glimpse of fairyland.  This I
+cannot succeed in doing, and it is better so.  I much prefer to
+believe that all this pomp, and vanity, and show, and mumbo-jumbo
+foolery has come from fairyland, than to believe it the performance
+of sane and sensible people who have mastered matter and solved the
+secrets of the stars.
+
+Princes and princelings, dukes, duchesses, and all manner of
+coroneted folk of the royal train are flashing past; more warriors,
+and lackeys, and conquered peoples, and the pagent is over.  I drift
+with the crowd out of the square into a tangle of narrow streets,
+where the public-houses are a-roar with drunkenness, men, women, and
+children mixed together in colossal debauch.  And on every side is
+rising the favourite song of the Coronation:-
+
+
+"Oh! on Coronation Day, on Coronation Day,
+We'll have a spree, a jubilee, and shout, Hip, hip, hooray,
+For we'll all be marry, drinking whisky, wine, and sherry,
+We'll all be merry on Coronation Day."
+
+
+The rain is pouring down.  Up the street come troops of the
+auxiliaries, black Africans and yellow Asiatics, beturbaned and
+befezed, and coolies swinging along with machine guns and mountain
+batteries on their heads, and the bare feet of all, in quick rhythm,
+going slish, slish, slish through the pavement mud.  The public-
+houses empty by magic, and the swarthy allegiants are cheered by
+their British brothers, who return at once to the carouse.
+
+"And how did you like the procession, mate?" I asked an old man on a
+bench in Green Park.
+
+"'Ow did I like it?  A bloomin' good chawnce, sez I to myself, for a
+sleep, wi' all the coppers aw'y, so I turned into the corner there,
+along wi' fifty others.  But I couldn't sleep, a-lyin' there an'
+thinkin' 'ow I'd worked all the years o' my life an' now 'ad no
+plyce to rest my 'ead; an' the music comin' to me, an' the cheers
+an' cannon, till I got almost a hanarchist an' wanted to blow out
+the brains o' the Lord Chamberlain."
+
+Why the Lord Chamberlain I could not precisely see, nor could he,
+but that was the way he felt, he said conclusively, and them was no
+more discussion.
+
+As night drew on, the city became a blaze of light.  Splashes of
+colour, green, amber, and ruby, caught the eye at every point, and
+"E. R.," in great crystal letters and backed by flaming gas, was
+everywhere.  The crowds in the streets increased by hundreds of
+thousands, and though the police sternly put down mafficking,
+drunkenness and rough play abounded.  The tired workers seemed to
+have gone mad with the relaxation and excitement, and they surged
+and danced down the streets, men and women, old and young, with
+linked arms and in long rows, singing, "I may be crazy, but I love
+you," "Dolly Gray," and "The Honeysuckle and the Bee"--the last
+rendered something like this:-
+
+
+"Yew aw the enny, ennyseckle, Oi em ther bee,
+Oi'd like ter sip ther enny from those red lips, yew see."
+
+
+I sat on a bench on the Thames Embankment, looking across the
+illuminated water.  It was approaching midnight, and before me
+poured the better class of merrymakers, shunning the more riotous
+streets and returning home.  On the bench beside me sat two ragged
+creatures, a man and a woman, nodding and dozing.  The woman sat
+with her arms clasped across the breast, holding tightly, her body
+in constant play--now dropping forward till it seemed its balance
+would be overcome and she would fall to the pavement; now inclining
+to the left, sideways, till her head rested on the man's shoulder;
+and now to the right, stretched and strained, till the pain of it
+awoke her and she sat bolt upright.  Whereupon the dropping forward
+would begin again and go through its cycle till she was aroused by
+the strain and stretch.
+
+Every little while boys and young men stopped long enough to go
+behind the bench and give vent to sudden and fiendish shouts.  This
+always jerked the man and woman abruptly from their sleep; and at
+sight of the startled woe upon their faces the crowd would roar with
+laughter as it flooded past.
+
+This was the most striking thing, the general heartlessness
+exhibited on every hand.  It is a commonplace, the homeless on the
+benches, the poor miserable folk who may be teased and are harmless.
+Fifty thousand people must have passed the bench while I sat upon
+it, and not one, on such a jubilee occasion as the crowning of the
+King, felt his heart-strings touched sufficiently to come up and say
+to the woman:  "Here's sixpence; go and get a bed."  But the women,
+especially the young women, made witty remarks upon the woman
+nodding, and invariably set their companions laughing.
+
+To use a Briticism, it was "cruel"; the corresponding Americanism
+was more appropriate--it was "fierce."  I confess I began to grow
+incensed at this happy crowd streaming by, and to extract a sort of
+satisfaction from the London statistics which demonstrate that one
+in every four adults is destined to die on public charity, either in
+the workhouse, the infirmary, or the asylum.
+
+I talked with the man.  He was fifty-four and a broken-down docker.
+He could only find odd work when there was a large demand for
+labour, for the younger and stronger men were preferred when times
+were slack.  He had spent a week, now, on the benches of the
+Embankment; but things looked brighter for next week, and he might
+possibly get in a few days' work and have a bed in some doss-house.
+He had lived all his life in London, save for five years, when, in
+1878, he saw foreign service in India.
+
+Of course he would eat; so would the girl.  Days like this were
+uncommon hard on such as they, though the coppers were so busy poor
+folk could get in more sleep.  I awoke the girl, or woman, rather,
+for she was "Eyght an' twenty, sir," and we started for a coffee-
+house.
+
+"Wot a lot o' work puttin' up the lights," said the man at sight of
+some building superbly illuminated.  This was the keynote of his
+being.  All his fife he had worked, and the whole objective
+universe, as well as his own soul, he could express in terms only of
+work.  "Coronations is some good," he went on.  "They give work to
+men."
+
+"But your belly is empty," I said.
+
+"Yes," he answered.  "I tried, but there wasn't any chawnce.  My age
+is against me.  Wot do you work at?  Seafarin' chap, eh?  I knew it
+from yer clothes."
+
+"I know wot you are," said the girl, "an Eyetalian."
+
+"No 'e ayn't," the man cried heatedly.  "'E's a Yank, that's wot 'e
+is.  I know."
+
+"Lord lumne, look a' that," she exclaimed, as we debauched upon the
+Strand, choked with the roaring, reeling Coronation crowd, the men
+bellowing and the girls singing in high throaty notes:-
+
+
+"Oh! on Coronation D'y, on Coronation D'y,
+We'll 'ave a spree, a jubilee, an' shout 'Ip, 'ip, 'ooray;
+For we'll all be merry, drinkin' whisky, wine, and sherry,
+We'll all be merry on Coronation D'y."
+
+
+"'Ow dirty I am, bein' around the w'y I 'ave," the woman said, as
+she sat down in a coffee-house, wiping the sleep and grime from the
+corners of her eyes.  "An' the sights I 'ave seen this d'y, an' I
+enjoyed it, though it was lonesome by myself.  An' the duchesses an'
+the lydies 'ad sich gran' w'ite dresses.  They was jest bu'ful,
+bu'ful."
+
+"I'm Irish," she said, in answer to a question.  "My nyme's
+Eyethorne."
+
+"What?" I asked.
+
+"Eyethorne, sir; Eyethorne."
+
+"Spell it."
+
+"H-a-y-t-h-o-r-n-e, Eyethorne.'
+
+"Oh," I said, "Irish Cockney."
+
+"Yes, sir, London-born."
+
+She had lived happily at home till her father died, killed in an
+accident, when she had found herself on the world.  One brother was
+in the army, and the other brother, engaged in keeping a wife and
+eight children on twenty shillings a week and unsteady employment,
+could do nothing for her.  She had been out of London once in her
+life, to a place in Essex, twelve miles away, where she had picked
+fruit for three weeks:  "An' I was as brown as a berry w'en I come
+back.  You won't b'lieve it, but I was."
+
+The last place in which she had worked was a coffee-house, hours
+from seven in the morning till eleven at night, and for which she
+had received five shillings a week and her food.  Then she had
+fallen sick, and since emerging from the hospital had been unable to
+find anything to do.  She wasn't feeling up to much, and the last
+two nights had been spent in the street.
+
+Between them they stowed away a prodigious amount of food, this man
+and woman, and it was not till I had duplicated and triplicated
+their original orders that they showed signs of easing down.
+
+Once she reached across and felt the texture of my coat and shirt,
+and remarked upon the good clothes the Yanks wore.  My rags good
+clothes!  It put me to the blush; but, on inspecting them more
+closely and on examining the clothes worn by the man and woman, I
+began to feel quite well dressed and respectable.
+
+"What do you expect to do in the end?" I asked them.  "You know
+you're growing older every day."
+
+"Work'ouse," said he.
+
+"Gawd blimey if I do," said she.  "There's no 'ope for me, I know,
+but I'll die on the streets.  No work'ouse for me, thank you.  No,
+indeed," she sniffed in the silence that fell.
+
+"After you have been out all night in the streets," I asked, "what
+do you do in the morning for something to eat?"
+
+"Try to get a penny, if you 'aven't one saved over," the man
+explained.  "Then go to a coffee-'ouse an' get a mug o' tea."
+
+"But I don't see how that is to feed you," I objected.
+
+The pair smiled knowingly.
+
+"You drink your tea in little sips," he went on, "making it last its
+longest.  An' you look sharp, an' there's some as leaves a bit
+be'ind 'em."
+
+"It's s'prisin', the food wot some people leaves," the woman broke
+in.
+
+"The thing," said the man judicially, as the trick dawned upon me,
+"is to get 'old o' the penny."
+
+As we started to leave, Miss Haythorne gathered up a couple of
+crusts from the neighbouring tables and thrust them somewhere into
+her rags.
+
+"Cawn't wyste 'em, you know," said she; to which the docker nodded,
+tucking away a couple of crusts himself.
+
+At three in the morning I strolled up the Embankment.  It was a gala
+night for the homeless, for the police were elsewhere; and each
+bench was jammed with sleeping occupants.  There were as many women
+as men, and the great majority of them, male and female, were old.
+Occasionally a boy was to be seen.  On one bench I noticed a family,
+a man sitting upright with a sleeping babe in his arms, his wife
+asleep, her head on his shoulder, and in her lap the head of a
+sleeping youngster.  The man's eyes were wide open.  He was staring
+out over the water and thinking, which is not a good thing for a
+shelterless man with a family to do.  It would not be a pleasant
+thing to speculate upon his thoughts; but this I know, and all
+London knows, that the cases of out-of-works killing their wives and
+babies is not an uncommon happening.
+
+One cannot walk along the Thames Embankment, in the small hours of
+morning, from the Houses of Parliament, past Cleopatra's Needle, to
+Waterloo Bridge, without being reminded of the sufferings, seven and
+twenty centuries old, recited by the author of "Job":-
+
+
+There are that remove the landmarks; they violently take away flocks
+and feed them.
+
+They drive away the ass of the fatherless, they take the widow's ox
+for a pledge.
+
+They turn the needy out of the way; the poor of the earth hide
+themselves together.
+
+Behold, as wild asses in the desert they go forth to their work,
+seeking diligently for meat; the wilderness yieldeth them food for
+their children.
+
+They cut their provender in the field, and they glean the vintage of
+the wicked.
+
+They lie all night naked without clothing, and have no covering in
+the cold.
+
+They are wet with the showers of the mountains, and embrace the rock
+for want of a shelter.
+
+There are that pluck the fatherless from the breast, and take a
+pledge of the poor.
+
+So that they go about naked without clothing, and being an hungered
+they carry the sheaves.--Job xxiv. 2-10.
+
+
+Seven and twenty centuries agone!  And it is all as true and
+apposite to-day in the innermost centre of this Christian
+civilisation whereof Edward VII. is king.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII--DAN CULLEN, DOCKER
+
+
+
+I stood, yesterday, in a room in one of the "Municipal Dwellings,"
+not far from Leman Street.  If I looked into a dreary future and saw
+that I would have to live in such a room until I died, I should
+immediately go down, plump into the Thames, and cut the tenancy
+short.
+
+It was not a room.  Courtesy to the language will no more permit it
+to be called a room than it will permit a hovel to be called a
+mansion.  It was a den, a lair.  Seven feet by eight were its
+dimensions, and the ceiling was so low as not to give the cubic air
+space required by a British soldier in barracks.  A crazy couch,
+with ragged coverlets, occupied nearly half the room.  A rickety
+table, a chair, and a couple of boxes left little space in which to
+turn around.  Five dollars would have purchased everything in sight.
+The floor was bare, while the walls and ceiling were literally
+covered with blood marks and splotches.  Each mark represented a
+violent death--of an insect, for the place swarmed with vermin, a
+plague with which no person could cope single-handed.
+
+The man who had occupied this hole, one Dan Cullen, docker, was
+dying in hospital.  Yet he had impressed his personality on his
+miserable surroundings sufficiently to give an inkling as to what
+sort of man he was.  On the walls were cheap pictures of Garibaldi,
+Engels, Dan Burns, and other labour leaders, while on the table lay
+one of Walter Besant's novels.  He knew his Shakespeare, I was told,
+and had read history, sociology, and economics.  And he was self-
+educated.
+
+On the table, amidst a wonderful disarray, lay a sheet of paper on
+which was scrawled:  Mr. Cullen, please return the large white jug
+and corkscrew I lent you--articles loaned, during the first stages
+of his sickness, by a woman neighbour, and demanded back in
+anticipation of his death.  A large white jug and a corkscrew are
+far too valuable to a creature of the Abyss to permit another
+creature to die in peace.  To the last, Dan Cullen's soul must be
+harrowed by the sordidness out of which it strove vainly to rise.
+
+It is a brief little story, the story of Dan Cullen, but there is
+much to read between the lines.  He was born lowly, in a city and
+land where the lines of caste are tightly drawn.  All his days he
+toiled hard with his body; and because he had opened the books, and
+been caught up by the fires of the spirit, and could "write a letter
+like a lawyer," he had been selected by his fellows to toil hard for
+them with his brain.  He became a leader of the fruit-porters,
+represented the dockers on the London Trades Council, and wrote
+trenchant articles for the labour journals.
+
+He did not cringe to other men, even though they were his economic
+masters, and controlled the means whereby he lived, and he spoke his
+mind freely, and fought the good fight.  In the "Great Dock Strike"
+he was guilty of taking a leading part.  And that was the end of Dan
+Cullen.  From that day he was a marked man, and every day, for ten
+years and more, he was "paid off" for what he had done.
+
+A docker is a casual labourer.  Work ebbs and flows, and he works or
+does not work according to the amount of goods on hand to be moved.
+Dan Cullen was discriminated against.  While he was not absolutely
+turned away (which would have caused trouble, and which would
+certainly have been more merciful), he was called in by the foreman
+to do not more than two or three days' work per week.  This is what
+is called being "disciplined," or "drilled."  It means being
+starved.  There is no politer word.  Ten years of it broke his
+heart, and broken-hearted men cannot live.
+
+He took to his bed in his terrible den, which grew more terrible
+with his helplessness.  He was without kith or kin, a lonely old
+man, embittered and pessimistic, fighting vermin the while and
+looking at Garibaldi, Engels, and Dan Burns gazing down at him from
+the blood-bespattered walls.  No one came to see him in that crowded
+municipal barracks (he had made friends with none of them), and he
+was left to rot.
+
+But from the far reaches of the East End came a cobbler and his son,
+his sole friends.  They cleansed his room, brought fresh linen from
+home, and took from off his limbs the sheets, greyish-black with
+dirt.  And they brought to him one of the Queen's Bounty nurses from
+Aldgate.
+
+She washed his face, shook up his conch, and talked with him.  It
+was interesting to talk with him--until he learned her name.  Oh,
+yes, Blank was her name, she replied innocently, and Sir George
+Blank was her brother.  Sir George Blank, eh? thundered old Dan
+Cullen on his death-bed; Sir George Blank, solicitor to the docks at
+Cardiff, who, more than any other man, had broken up the Dockers'
+Union of Cardiff, and was knighted?  And she was his sister?
+Thereupon Dan Cullen sat up on his crazy couch and pronounced
+anathema upon her and all her breed; and she fled, to return no
+more, strongly impressed with the ungratefulness of the poor.
+
+Dan Cullen's feet became swollen with dropsy.  He sat up all day on
+the side of the bed (to keep the water out of his body), no mat on
+the floor, a thin blanket on his legs, and an old coat around his
+shoulders.  A missionary brought him a pair of paper slippers, worth
+fourpence (I saw them), and proceeded to offer up fifty prayers or
+so for the good of Dan Cullen's soul.  But Dan Cullen was the sort
+of man that wanted his soul left alone.  He did not care to have
+Tom, Dick, or Harry, on the strength of fourpenny slippers,
+tampering with it.  He asked the missionary kindly to open the
+window, so that he might toss the slippers out.  And the missionary
+went away, to return no more, likewise impressed with the
+ungratefulness of the poor.
+
+The cobbler, a brave old hero himself, though unaneled and unsung,
+went privily to the head office of the big fruit brokers for whom
+Dan Cullen had worked as a casual labourer for thirty years.  Their
+system was such that the work was almost entirely done by casual
+hands.  The cobbler told them the man's desperate plight, old,
+broken, dying, without help or money, reminded them that he had
+worked for them thirty years, and asked them to do something for
+him.
+
+"Oh," said the manager, remembering Dan Cullen without having to
+refer to the books, "you see, we make it a rule never to help
+casuals, and we can do nothing."
+
+Nor did they do anything, not even sign a letter asking for Dan
+Cullen's admission to a hospital.  And it is not so easy to get into
+a hospital in London Town.  At Hampstead, if he passed the doctors,
+at least four months would elapse before he could get in, there were
+so many on the books ahead of him.  The cobbler finally got him into
+the Whitechapel Infirmary, where he visited him frequently.  Here he
+found that Dan Cullen had succumbed to the prevalent feeling, that,
+being hopeless, they were hurrying him out of the way.  A fair and
+logical conclusion, one must agree, for an old and broken man to
+arrive at, who has been resolutely "disciplined" and "drilled" for
+ten years.  When they sweated him for Bright's disease to remove the
+fat from the kidneys, Dan Cullen contended that the sweating was
+hastening his death; while Bright's disease, being a wasting away of
+the kidneys, there was therefore no fat to remove, and the doctor's
+excuse was a palpable lie.  Whereupon the doctor became wroth, and
+did not come near him for nine days.
+
+Then his bed was tilted up so that his feet and legs were elevated.
+At once dropsy appeared in the body, and Dan Cullen contended that
+the thing was done in order to run the water down into his body from
+his legs and kill him more quickly.  He demanded his discharge,
+though they told him he would die on the stairs, and dragged
+himself, more dead than alive, to the cobbler's shop.  At the moment
+of writing this, he is dying at the Temperance Hospital, into which
+place his staunch friend, the cobbler, moved heaven and earth to
+have him admitted.
+
+Poor Dan Cullen!  A Jude the Obscure, who reached out after
+knowledge; who toiled with his body in the day and studied in the
+watches of the night; who dreamed his dream and struck valiantly for
+the Cause; a patriot, a lover of human freedom, and a fighter
+unafraid; and in the end, not gigantic enough to beat down the
+conditions which baffled and stifled him, a cynic and a pessimist,
+gasping his final agony on a pauper's couch in a charity ward,--"For
+a man to die who might have been wise and was not, this I call a
+tragedy."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV--HOPS AND HOPPERS
+
+
+
+So far has the divorcement of the worker from the soil proceeded,
+that the farming districts, the civilised world over, are dependent
+upon the cities for the gathering of the harvests.  Then it is, when
+the land is spilling its ripe wealth to waste, that the street folk,
+who have been driven away from the soil, are called back to it
+again.  But in England they return, not as prodigals, but as
+outcasts still, as vagrants and pariahs, to be doubted and flouted
+by their country brethren, to sleep in jails and casual wards, or
+under the hedges, and to live the Lord knows how.
+
+It is estimated that Kent alone requires eighty thousand of the
+street people to pick her hops.  And out they come, obedient to the
+call, which is the call of their bellies and of the lingering dregs
+of adventure-lust still in them.  Slum, stews, and ghetto pour them
+forth, and the festering contents of slum, stews, and ghetto are
+undiminished.  Yet they overrun the country like an army of ghouls,
+and the country does not want them.  They are out of place.  As they
+drag their squat, misshapen bodies along the highways and byways,
+they resemble some vile spawn from underground.  Their very
+presence, the fact of their existence, is an outrage to the fresh,
+bright sun and the green and growing things.  The clean, upstanding
+trees cry shame upon them and their withered crookedness, and their
+rottenness is a slimy desecration of the sweetness and purity of
+nature.
+
+Is the picture overdrawn?  It all depends.  For one who sees and
+thinks life in terms of shares and coupons, it is certainly
+overdrawn.  But for one who sees and thinks life in terms of manhood
+and womanhood, it cannot be overdrawn.  Such hordes of beastly
+wretchedness and inarticulate misery are no compensation for a
+millionaire brewer who lives in a West End palace, sates himself
+with the sensuous delights of London's golden theatres, hobnobs with
+lordlings and princelings, and is knighted by the king.  Wins his
+spurs--God forbid!  In old time the great blonde beasts rode in the
+battle's van and won their spurs by cleaving men from pate to chine.
+And, after all, it is finer to kill a strong man with a clean-
+slicing blow of singing steel than to make a beast of him, and of
+his seed through the generations, by the artful and spidery
+manipulation of industry and politics.
+
+But to return to the hops.  Here the divorcement from the soil is as
+apparent as in every other agricultural line in England.  While the
+manufacture of beer steadily increases, the growth of hops steadily
+decreases.  In 1835 the acreage under hops was 71,327.  To-day it
+stands at 48,024, a decrease of 3103 from the acreage of last year.
+
+Small as the acreage is this year, a poor summer and terrible storms
+reduced the yield.  This misfortune is divided between the people
+who own hops and the people who pick hops.  The owners perforce must
+put up with less of the nicer things of life, the pickers with less
+grub, of which, in the best of times, they never get enough.  For
+weary weeks headlines like the following have appeared in the London
+papers.-
+
+
+TRAMPS PLENTIFUL, BUT THE HOPS ARE FEW AND NOT YET READY.
+
+
+Then there have been numberless paragraphs like this:-
+
+
+From the neighbourhood of the hop fields comes news of a distressing
+nature.  The bright outburst of the last two days has sent many
+hundreds of hoppers into Kent, who will have to wait till the fields
+are ready for them.  At Dover the number of vagrants in the
+workhouse is treble the number there last year at this time, and in
+other towns the lateness of the season is responsible for a large
+increase in the number of casuals.
+
+
+To cap their wretchedness, when at last the picking had begun, hops
+and hoppers were well-nigh swept away by a frightful storm of wind,
+rain, and hail.  The hops were stripped clean from the poles and
+pounded into the earth, while the hoppers, seeking shelter from the
+stinging hail, were close to drowning in their huts and camps on the
+low-lying ground.  Their condition after the storm was pitiable,
+their state of vagrancy more pronounced than ever; for, poor crop
+that it was, its destruction had taken away the chance of earning a
+few pennies, and nothing remained for thousands of them but to "pad
+the hoof" back to London.
+
+"We ayn't crossin'-sweepers," they said, turning away from the
+ground, carpeted ankle-deep with hops.
+
+Those that remained grumbled savagely among the half-stripped poles
+at the seven bushels for a shilling--a rate paid in good seasons
+when the hops are in prime condition, and a rate likewise paid in
+bad seasons by the growers because they cannot afford more.
+
+I passed through Teston and East and West Farleigh shortly after the
+storm, and listened to the grumbling of the hoppers and saw the hops
+rotting on the ground.  At the hothouses of Barham Court, thirty
+thousand panes of glass had been broken by the hail, while peaches,
+plums, pears, apples, rhubarb, cabbages, mangolds, everything, had
+been pounded to pieces and torn to shreds.
+
+All of which was too bad for the owners, certainly; but at the
+worst, not one of them, for one meal, would have to go short of food
+or drink.  Yet it was to them that the newspapers devoted columns of
+sympathy, their pecuniary losses being detailed at harrowing length.
+"Mr. Herbert L- calculates his loss at 8000 pounds;" "Mr. F-, of
+brewery fame, who rents all the land in this parish, loses 10,000
+pounds;" and "Mr. L-, the Wateringbury brewer, brother to Mr.
+Herbert L-, is another heavy loser."  As for the hoppers, they did
+not count.  Yet I venture to assert that the several almost-square
+meals lost by underfed William Buggles, and underfed Mrs. Buggles,
+and the underfed Buggles kiddies, was a greater tragedy than the
+10,000 pounds lost by Mr. F-.  And in addition, underfed William
+Buggles' tragedy might be multiplied by thousands where Mr. F-'s
+could not be multiplied by five.
+
+To see how William Buggles and his kind fared, I donned my seafaring
+togs and started out to get a job.  With me was a young East London
+cobbler, Bert, who had yielded to the lure of adventure and joined
+me for the trip.  Acting on my advice, he had brought his "worst
+rags," and as we hiked up the London road out of Maidstone he was
+worrying greatly for fear we had come too ill-dressed for the
+business.
+
+Nor was he to be blamed.  When we stopped in a tavern the publican
+eyed us gingerly, nor did his demeanour brighten till we showed him
+the colour of our cash.  The natives along the coast were all
+dubious; and "bean-feasters" from London, dashing past in coaches,
+cheered and jeered and shouted insulting things after us.  But
+before we were done with the Maidstone district my friend found that
+we were as well clad, if not better, than the average hopper.  Some
+of the bunches of rags we chanced upon were marvellous.
+
+"The tide is out," called a gypsy-looking woman to her mates, as we
+came up a long row of bins into which the pickers were stripping the
+hops.
+
+"Do you twig?" Bert whispered.  "She's on to you."
+
+I twigged.  And it must be confessed the figure was an apt one.
+When the tide is out boats are left on the beach and do not sail,
+and a sailor, when the tide is out, does not sail either.  My
+seafaring togs and my presence in the hop field proclaimed that I
+was a seaman without a ship, a man on the beach, and very like a
+craft at low water.
+
+"Can yer give us a job, governor?" Bert asked the bailiff, a kindly
+faced and elderly man who was very busy.
+
+His "No" was decisively uttered; but Bert clung on and followed him
+about, and I followed after, pretty well all over the field.
+Whether our persistency struck the bailiff as anxiety to work, or
+whether he was affected by our hard-luck appearance and tale,
+neither Bert nor I succeeded in making out; but in the end he
+softened his heart and found us the one unoccupied bin in the place-
+-a bin deserted by two other men, from what I could learn, because
+of inability to make living wages.
+
+"No bad conduct, mind ye," warned the bailiff, as he left us at work
+in the midst of the women.
+
+It was Saturday afternoon, and we knew quitting time would come
+early; so we applied ourselves earnestly to the task, desiring to
+learn if we could at least make our salt.  It was simple work,
+woman's work, in fact, and not man's.  We sat on the edge of the
+bin, between the standing hops, while a pole-puller supplied us with
+great fragrant branches.  In an hour's time we became as expert as
+it is possible to become.  As soon as the fingers became accustomed
+automatically to differentiate between hops and leaves and to strip
+half-a-dozen blossoms at a time there was no more to learn.
+
+We worked nimbly, and as fast as the women themselves, though their
+bins filled more rapidly because of their swarming children, each of
+which picked with two hands almost as fast as we picked.
+
+" Don'tcher pick too clean, it's against the rules," one of the
+women informed us; and we took the tip and were grateful.
+
+As the afternoon wore along, we realised that living wages could not
+be made--by men.  Women could pick as much as men, and children
+could do almost as well as women; so it was impossible for a man to
+compete with a woman and half-a-dozen children.  For it is the woman
+and the half-dozen children who count as a unit, and by their
+combined capacity determine the unit's pay.
+
+"I say, matey, I'm beastly hungry," said I to Bert.  We had not had
+any dinner.
+
+"Blimey, but I could eat the 'ops," he replied.
+
+Whereupon we both lamented our negligence in not rearing up a
+numerous progeny to help us in this day of need.  And in such
+fashion we whiled away the time and talked for the edification of
+our neighbours.  We quite won the sympathy of the pole-puller, a
+young country yokel, who now and again emptied a few picked blossoms
+into our bin, it being part of his business to gather up the stray
+clusters torn off in the process of pulling.
+
+With him we discussed how much we could "sub," and were informed
+that while we were being paid a shilling for seven bushels, we could
+only "sub," or have advanced to us, a shilling for every twelve
+bushels.  Which is to say that the pay for five out of every twelve
+bushels was withheld--a method of the grower to hold the hopper to
+his work whether the crop runs good or bad, and especially if it
+runs bad.
+
+After all, it was pleasant sitting there in the bright sunshine, the
+golden pollen showering from our hands, the pungent aromatic odour
+of the hops biting our nostrils, and the while remembering dimly the
+sounding cities whence these people came.  Poor street people!  Poor
+gutter folk!  Even they grow earth-hungry, and yearn vaguely for the
+soil from which they have been driven, and for the free life in the
+open, and the wind and rain and sun all undefiled by city smirches.
+As the sea calls to the sailor, so calls the land to them; and, deep
+down in their aborted and decaying carcasses, they are stirred
+strangely by the peasant memories of their forbears who lived before
+cities were.  And in incomprehensible ways they are made glad by the
+earth smells and sights and sounds which their blood has not
+forgotten though unremembered by them.
+
+"No more 'ops, matey," Bert complained.
+
+It was five o'clock, and the pole-pullers had knocked off, so that
+everything could be cleaned up, there being no work on Sunday.  For
+an hour we were forced idly to wait the coming of the measurers, our
+feet tingling with the frost which came on the heels of the setting
+sun.  In the adjoining bin, two women and half-a-dozen children had
+picked nine bushels:  so that the five bushels the measurers found
+in our bin demonstrated that we had done equally well, for the half-
+dozen children had ranged from nine to fourteen years of age.
+
+Five bushels!  We worked it out to eight-pence ha'penny, or
+seventeen cents, for two men working three hours and a half.
+Fourpence farthing apiece! a little over a penny an hour!  But we
+were allowed only to "sub" fivepence of the total sum, though the
+tally-keeper, short of change, gave us sixpence.  Entreaty was in
+vain.  A hard-luck story could not move him.  He proclaimed loudly
+that we had received a penny more than our due, and went his way.
+
+Granting, for the sake of the argument, that we were what we
+represented ourselves to be--namely, poor men and broke--then here
+was out position:  night was coming on; we had had no supper, much
+less dinner; and we possessed sixpence between us.  I was hungry
+enough to eat three sixpenn'orths of food, and so was Bert.  One
+thing was patent.  By doing 16.3 per cent. justice to our stomachs,
+we would expend the sixpence, and our stomachs would still be
+gnawing under 83.3 per cent. injustice.  Being broke again, we could
+sleep under a hedge, which was not so bad, though the cold would sap
+an undue portion of what we had eaten.  But the morrow was Sunday,
+on which we could do no work, though our silly stomachs would not
+knock off on that account.  Here, then, was the problem:  how to get
+three meals on Sunday, and two on Monday (for we could not make
+another "sub" till Monday evening).
+
+We knew that the casual wards were over-crowded; also, that if we
+begged from farmer or villager, there was a large likelihood of our
+going to jail for fourteen days.  What was to be done?  We looked at
+each other in despair -
+
+- Not a bit of it.  We joyfully thanked God that we were not as
+other men, especially hoppers, and went down the road to Maidstone,
+jingling in our pockets the half-crowns and florins we had brought
+from London.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV--THE SEA WIFE
+
+
+
+You might not expect to find the Sea Wife in the heart of Kent, but
+that is where I found her, in a mean street, in the poor quarter of
+Maidstone.  In her window she had no sign of lodgings to let, and
+persuasion was necessary before she could bring herself to let me
+sleep in her front room.  In the evening I descended to the semi-
+subterranean kitchen, and talked with her and her old man, Thomas
+Mugridge by name.
+
+And as I talked to them, all the subtleties and complexities of this
+tremendous machine civilisation vanished away.  It seemed that I
+went down through the skin and the flesh to the naked soul of it,
+and in Thomas Mugridge and his old woman gripped hold of the essence
+of this remarkable English breed.  I found there the spirit of the
+wanderlust which has lured Albion's sons across the zones; and I
+found there the colossal unreckoning which has tricked the English
+into foolish squabblings and preposterous fights, and the doggedness
+and stubbornness which have brought them blindly through to empire
+and greatness; and likewise I found that vast, incomprehensible
+patience which has enabled the home population to endure under the
+burden of it all, to toil without complaint through the weary years,
+and docilely to yield the best of its sons to fight and colonise to
+the ends of the earth.
+
+Thomas Mugridge was seventy-one years old and a little man.  It was
+because he was little that he had not gone for a soldier.  He had
+remained at home and worked.  His first recollections were connected
+with work.  He knew nothing else but work.  He had worked all his
+days, and at seventy-one he still worked.  Each morning saw him up
+with the lark and afield, a day labourer, for as such he had been
+born.  Mrs. Mugridge was seventy-three.  From seven years of age she
+had worked in the fields, doing a boy's work at first, and later a
+man's.  She still worked, keeping the house shining, washing,
+boiling, and baking, and, with my advent, cooking for me and shaming
+me by making my bed.  At the end of threescore years and more of
+work they possessed nothing, had nothing to look forward to save
+more work.  And they were contented.  They expected nothing else,
+desired nothing else.
+
+They lived simply.  Their wants were few--a pint of beer at the end
+of the day, sipped in the semi-subterranean kitchen, a weekly paper
+to pore over for seven nights hand-running, and conversation as
+meditative and vacant as the chewing of a heifer's cud.  From a wood
+engraving on the wall a slender, angelic girl looked down upon them,
+and underneath was the legend:  "Our Future Queen."  And from a
+highly coloured lithograph alongside looked down a stout and elderly
+lady, with underneath:  "Our Queen--Diamond Jubilee."
+
+"What you earn is sweetest," quoth Mrs. Mugridge, when I suggested
+that it was about time they took a rest.
+
+"No, an' we don't want help," said Thomas Mugridge, in reply to my
+question as to whether the children lent them a hand.
+
+"We'll work till we dry up and blow away, mother an' me," he added;
+and Mrs. Mugridge nodded her head in vigorous indorsement.
+
+Fifteen children she had borne, and all were away and gone, or dead.
+The "baby," however, lived in Maidstone, and she was twenty-seven.
+When the children married they had their hands full with their own
+families and troubles, like their fathers and mothers before them.
+
+Where were the children?  Ah, where were they not?  Lizzie was in
+Australia; Mary was in Buenos Ayres; Poll was in New York; Joe had
+died in India--and so they called them up, the living and the dead,
+soldier and sailor, and colonist's wife, for the traveller's sake
+who sat in their kitchen.
+
+They passed me a photograph.  A trim young fellow, in soldier's garb
+looked out at me.
+
+"And which son is this?" I asked.
+
+They laughed a hearty chorus.  Son!  Nay, grandson, just back from
+Indian service and a soldier-trumpeter to the King.  His brother was
+in the same regiment with him.  And so it ran, sons and daughters,
+and grand sons and daughters, world-wanderers and empire-builders,
+all of them, while the old folks stayed at home and worked at
+building empire too.
+
+
+"There dwells a wife by the Northern Gate,
+And a wealthy wife is she;
+She breeds a breed o' rovin' men
+And casts them over sea.
+
+"And some are drowned in deep water,
+And some in sight of shore;
+And word goes back to the weary wife,
+And ever she sends more."
+
+
+But the Sea Wife's child-bearing is about done.  The stock is
+running out, and the planet is filling up.  The wives of her sons
+may carry on the breed, but her work is past.  The erstwhile men of
+England are now the men of Australia, of Africa, of America.
+England has sent forth "the best she breeds" for so long, and has
+destroyed those that remained so fiercely, that little remains for
+her to do but to sit down through the long nights and gaze at
+royalty on the wall.
+
+The true British merchant seaman has passed away.  The merchant
+service is no longer a recruiting ground for such sea dogs as fought
+with Nelson at Trafalgar and the Nile.  Foreigners largely man the
+merchant ships, though Englishmen still continue to officer them and
+to prefer foreigners for'ard.  In South Africa the colonial teaches
+the islander how to shoot, and the officers muddle and blunder;
+while at home the street people play hysterically at mafficking, and
+the War Office lowers the stature for enlistment.
+
+It could not be otherwise.  The most complacent Britisher cannot
+hope to draw off the life-blood, and underfeed, and keep it up
+forever.  The average Mrs. Thomas Mugridge has been driven into the
+city, and she is not breeding very much of anything save an anaemic
+and sickly progeny which cannot find enough to eat.  The strength of
+the English-speaking race to-day is not in the tight little island,
+but in the New World overseas, where are the sons and daughters of
+Mrs. Thomas Mugridge.  The Sea Wife by the Northern Gate has just
+about done her work in the world, though she does not realize it.
+She must sit down and rest her tired loins for a space; and if the
+casual ward and the workhouse do not await her, it is because of the
+sons and daughters she has reared up against the day of her
+feebleness and decay.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI--PROPERTY VERSUS PERSON
+
+
+
+In a civilisation frankly materialistic and based upon property, not
+soul, it is inevitable that property shall be exalted over soul,
+that crimes against property shall be considered far more serious
+than crimes against the person.  To pound one's wife to a jelly and
+break a few of her ribs is a trivial offence compared with sleeping
+out under the naked stars because one has not the price of a doss.
+The lad who steals a few pears from a wealthy railway corporation is
+a greater menace to society than the young brute who commits an
+unprovoked assault upon an old man over seventy years of age.  While
+the young girl who takes a lodging under the pretence that she has
+work commits so dangerous an offence, that, were she not severely
+punished, she and her kind might bring the whole fabric of property
+clattering to the ground.  Had she unholily tramped Piccadilly and
+the Strand after midnight, the police would not have interfered with
+her, and she would have been able to pay for her lodging.
+
+The following illustrative cases are culled from the police-court
+reports for a single week:-
+
+
+Widnes Police Court.  Before Aldermen Gossage and Neil.  Thomas
+Lynch, charged with being drunk and disorderly and with assaulting a
+constable.  Defendant rescued a woman from custody, kicked the
+constable, and threw stones at him.  Fined 3s. 6d. for the first
+offence, and 10s. and costs for the assault.
+
+
+Glasgow Queen's Park Police Court.  Before Baillie Norman Thompson.
+John Kane pleaded guilty to assaulting his wife.  There were five
+previous convictions.  Fined 2 pounds, 2s.
+
+
+Taunton County Petty Sessions.  John Painter, a big, burly fellow,
+described as a labourer, charged with assaulting his wife.  The
+woman received two severe black eyes, and her face was badly
+swollen.  Fined 1 pound, 8s., including costs, and bound over to
+keep the peace.
+
+
+Widnes Police Court.  Richard Bestwick and George Hunt, charged with
+trespassing in search of game.  Hunt fined 1 pound and costs,
+Bestwick 2 pounds and costs; in default, one month.
+
+
+Shaftesbury Police Court.  Before the Mayor (Mr. A. T. Carpenter).
+Thomas Baker, charged with sleeping out.  Fourteen days.
+
+
+Glasgow Central Police Court.  Before Bailie Dunlop.  Edward
+Morrison, a lad, convicted of stealing fifteen pears from a lorry at
+the railroad station.  Seven days.
+
+
+Doncaster Borough Police Court.  Before Alderman Clark and other
+magistrates.  James M'Gowan, charged under the Poaching Prevention
+Act with being found in possession of poaching implements and a
+number of rabbits.  Fined 2 pounds and costs, or one month.
+
+
+Dunfermline Sheriff Court.  Before Sheriff Gillespie.  John Young, a
+pit-head worker, pleaded guilty to assaulting Alexander Storrar by
+beating him about the head and body with his fists, throwing him on
+the ground, and also striking him with a pit prop.  Fined 1 pound.
+
+
+Kirkcaldy Police Court.  Before Bailie Dishart.  Simon Walker
+pleaded guilty to assaulting a man by striking and knocking him
+down.  It was an unprovoked assault, and the magistrate described
+the accused as a perfect danger to the community.  Fined 30s.
+
+
+Mansfield Police Court.  Before the Mayor, Messrs. F. J. Turner, J.
+Whitaker, F. Tidsbury, E. Holmes, and Dr. R. Nesbitt.  Joseph
+Jackson, charged with assaulting Charles Nunn.  Without any
+provocation, defendant struck the complainant a violent blow in the
+face, knocking him down, and then kicked him on the side of the
+head.  He was rendered unconscious, and he remained under medical
+treatment for a fortnight.  Fined 21s.
+
+
+Perth Sheriff Court.  Before Sheriff Sym.  David Mitchell, charged
+with poaching.  There were two previous convictions, the last being
+three years ago.  The sheriff was asked to deal leniently with
+Mitchell, who was sixty-two years of age, and who offered no
+resistance to the gamekeeper.  Four months.
+
+
+Dundee Sheriff Court.  Before Hon. Sheriff-Substitute R. C. Walker.
+John Murray, Donald Craig, and James Parkes, charged with poaching.
+Craig and Parkes fined 1 pound each or fourteen days; Murray, 5
+pounds or one month.
+
+
+Reading Borough Police Court.  Before Messrs. W. B. Monck, F. B.
+Parfitt, H. M. Wallis, and G. Gillagan.  Alfred Masters, aged
+sixteen, charged with sleeping out on a waste piece of ground and
+having no visible means of subsistence.  Seven days.
+
+
+Salisbury City Petty Sessions.  Before the Mayor, Messrs. C.
+Hoskins, G. Fullford, E. Alexander, and W. Marlow.  James Moore,
+charged with stealing a pair of boots from outside a shop.  Twenty-
+one days.
+
+
+Horncastle Police Court.  Before the Rev. W. F. Massingberd, the
+Rev. J. Graham, and Mr. N. Lucas Calcraft.  George Brackenbury, a
+young labourer, convicted of what the magistrates characterised as
+an altogether unprovoked and brutal assault upon James Sargeant
+Foster, a man over seventy years of age.  Fined 1 pound and 5s. 6d.
+costs.
+
+
+Worksop Petty Sessions.  Before Messrs. F. J. S. Foljambe, R.
+Eddison, and S. Smith.  John Priestley, charged with assaulting the
+Rev. Leslie Graham.  Defendant, who was drunk, was wheeling a
+perambulator and pushed it in front of a lorry, with the result that
+the perambulator was overturned and the baby in it thrown out.  The
+lorry passed over the perambulator, but the baby was uninjured.
+Defendant then attacked the driver of the lorry, and afterwards
+assaulted the complainant, who remonstrated with him upon his
+conduct.  In consequence of the injuries defendant inflicted,
+complainant had to consult a doctor.  Fined 40s. and costs.
+
+
+Rotherham West Riding Police Court.  Before Messrs. C. Wright and G.
+Pugh and Colonel Stoddart.  Benjamin Storey, Thomas Brammer, and
+Samuel Wilcock, charged with poaching.  One month each.
+
+
+Southampton County Police Court.  Before Admiral J. C. Rowley, Mr.
+H. H. Culme-Seymour, and other magistrates.  Henry Thorrington,
+charged with sleeping out.  Seven days.
+
+
+Eckington Police Court.  Before Major L. B. Bowden, Messrs. R. Eyre,
+and H. A. Fowler, and Dr. Court.  Joseph Watts, charged with
+stealing nine ferns from a garden.  One month.
+
+
+Ripley Petty Sessions.  Before Messrs. J. B. Wheeler, W. D.
+Bembridge, and M. Hooper.  Vincent Allen and George Hall, charged
+under the Poaching Prevention Act with being found in possession of
+a number of rabbits, and John Sparham, charged with aiding and
+abetting them.  Hall and Sparham fined 1 pound, 17s. 4d., and Allen
+2 pounds, 17s. 4d., including costs; the former committed for
+fourteen days and the latter for one month in default of payment.
+
+
+South-western Police Court, London.  Before Mr. Rose.  John Probyn,
+charged with doing grievous bodily harm to a constable.  Prisoner
+had been kicking his wife, and also assaulting another woman who
+protested against his brutality.  The constable tried to persuade
+him to go inside his house, but prisoner suddenly turned upon him,
+knocking him down by a blow on the face, kicking him as he lay on
+the ground, and attempting to strangle him.  Finally the prisoner
+deliberately kicked the officer in a dangerous part, inflicting an
+injury which will keep him off duty for a long time to come.  Six
+weeks.
+
+
+Lambeth Police Court, London.  Before Mr. Hopkins.  "Baby" Stuart,
+aged nineteen, described as a chorus girl, charged with obtaining
+food and lodging to the value of 5s. by false pretences, and with
+intent to defraud Emma Brasier.  Emma Brasier, complainant, lodging-
+house keeper of Atwell Road.  Prisoner took apartments at her house
+on the representation that she was employed at the Crown Theatre.
+After prisoner had been in her house two or three days, Mrs. Brasier
+made inquiries, and, finding the girl's story untrue, gave her into
+custody.  Prisoner told the magistrate that she would have worked
+had she not had such bad health.  Six weeks' hard labour.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII--INEFFICIENCY
+
+
+
+I stopped a moment to listen to an argument on the Mile End Waste.
+It was night-time, and they were all workmen of the better class.
+They had surrounded one of their number, a pleasant-faced man of
+thirty, and were giving it to him rather heatedly.
+
+"But 'ow about this 'ere cheap immigration?" one of them demanded.
+"The Jews of Whitechapel, say, a-cutting our throats right along?"
+
+"You can't blame them," was the answer.  "They're just like us, and
+they've got to live.  Don't blame the man who offers to work cheaper
+than you and gets your job."
+
+"But 'ow about the wife an' kiddies?" his interlocutor demanded.
+
+"There you are," came the answer.  "How about the wife and kiddies
+of the man who works cheaper than you and gets your job?  Eh?  How
+about his wife and kiddies?  He's more interested in them than in
+yours, and he can't see them starve.  So he cuts the price of labour
+and out you go.  But you mustn't blame him, poor devil.  He can't
+help it.  Wages always come down when two men are after the same
+job.  That's the fault of competition, not of the man who cuts the
+price."
+
+"But wyges don't come down where there's a union," the objection was
+made.
+
+"And there you are again, right on the head.  The union cheeks
+competition among the labourers, but makes it harder where there are
+no unions.  There's where your cheap labour of Whitechapel comes in.
+They're unskilled, and have no unions, and cut each other's throats,
+and ours in the bargain, if we don't belong to a strong union."
+
+Without going further into the argument, this man on the Mile End
+Waste pointed the moral that when two men were after the one job
+wages were bound to fall.  Had he gone deeper into the matter, he
+would have found that even the union, say twenty thousand strong,
+could not hold up wages if twenty thousand idle men were trying to
+displace the union men.  This is admirably instanced, just now, by
+the return and disbandment of the soldiers from South Africa.  They
+find themselves, by tens of thousands, in desperate straits in the
+army of the unemployed.  There is a general decline in wages
+throughout the land, which, giving rise to labour disputes and
+strikes, is taken advantage of by the unemployed, who gladly pick up
+the tools thrown down by the strikers.
+
+Sweating, starvation wages, armies of unemployed, and great numbers
+of the homeless and shelterless are inevitable when there are more
+men to do work than there is work for men to do.  The men and women
+I have met upon the streets, and in the spikes and pegs, are not
+there because as a mode of life it may be considered a "soft snap."
+I have sufficiently outlined the hardships they undergo to
+demonstrate that their existence is anything but "soft."
+
+It is a matter of sober calculation, here in England, that it is
+softer to work for twenty shillings a week, and have regular food,
+and a bed at night, than it is to walk the streets.  The man who
+walks the streets suffers more, and works harder, for far less
+return.  I have depicted the nights they spend, and how, driven in
+by physical exhaustion, they go to the casual ward for a "rest up."
+Nor is the casual ward a soft snap.  To pick four pounds of oakum,
+break twelve hundredweight of stones, or perform the most revolting
+tasks, in return for the miserable food and shelter they receive, is
+an unqualified extravagance on the part of the men who are guilty of
+it.  On the part of the authorities it is sheer robbery.  They give
+the men far less for their labour than do the capitalistic
+employers.  The wage for the same amount of labour, performed for a
+private employer, would buy them better beds, better food, more good
+cheer, and, above all, greater freedom.
+
+As I say, it is an extravagance for a man to patronise a casual
+ward.  And that they know it themselves is shown by the way these
+men shun it till driven in by physical exhaustion.  Then why do they
+do it?  Not because they are discouraged workers.  The very opposite
+is true; they are discouraged vagabonds.  In the United States the
+tramp is almost invariably a discouraged worker.  He finds tramping
+a softer mode of life than working.  But this is not true in
+England.  Here the powers that be do their utmost to discourage the
+tramp and vagabond, and he is, in all truth, a mightily discouraged
+creature.  He knows that two shillings a day, which is only fifty
+cents, will buy him three fair meals, a bed at night, and leave him
+a couple of pennies for pocket money.  He would rather work for
+those two shillings than for the charity of the casual ward; for he
+knows that he would not have to work so hard, and that he would not
+be so abominably treated.  He does not do so, however, because there
+are more men to do work than there is work for men to do.
+
+When there are more men than there is work to be done, a sifting-out
+process must obtain.  In every branch of industry the less efficient
+are crowded out.  Being crowded out because of inefficiency, they
+cannot go up, but must descend, and continue to descend, until they
+reach their proper level, a place in the industrial fabric where
+they are efficient.  It follows, therefore, and it is inexorable,
+that the least efficient must descend to the very bottom, which is
+the shambles wherein they perish miserably.
+
+A glance at the confirmed inefficients at the bottom demonstrates
+that they are, as a rule, mental, physical, and moral wrecks.  The
+exceptions to the rule are the late arrivals, who are merely very
+inefficient, and upon whom the wrecking process is just beginning to
+operate.  All the forces here, it must be remembered, are
+destructive.  The good body (which is there because its brain is not
+quick and capable) is speedily wrenched and twisted out of shape;
+the clean mind (which is there because of its weak body) is speedily
+fouled and contaminated.
+
+The mortality is excessive, but, even then, they die far too
+lingering deaths.
+
+Here, then, we have the construction of the Abyss and the shambles.
+Throughout the whole industrial fabric a constant elimination is
+going on.  The inefficient are weeded out and flung downward.
+Various things constitute inefficiency.  The engineer who is
+irregular or irresponsible will sink down until he finds his place,
+say as a casual labourer, an occupation irregular in its very nature
+and in which there is little or no responsibility.  Those who are
+slow and clumsy, who suffer from weakness of body or mind, or who
+lack nervous, mental, and physical stamina, must sink down,
+sometimes rapidly, sometimes step by step, to the bottom.  Accident,
+by disabling an efficient worker, will make him inefficient, and
+down he must go.  And the worker who becomes aged, with failing
+energy and numbing brain, must begin the frightful descent which
+knows no stopping-place short of the bottom and death.
+
+In this last instance, the statistics of London tell a terrible
+tale.  The population of London is one-seventh of the total
+population of the United Kingdom, and in London, year in and year
+out, one adult in every four dies on public charity, either in the
+workhouse, the hospital, or the asylum.  When the fact that the
+well-to-do do not end thus is taken into consideration, it becomes
+manifest that it is the fate of at least one in every three adult
+workers to die on public charity.
+
+As an illustration of how a good worker may suddenly become
+inefficient, and what then happens to him, I am tempted to give the
+case of M'Garry, a man thirty-two years of age, and an inmate of the
+workhouse.  The extracts are quoted from the annual report of the
+trade union.
+
+
+I worked at Sullivan's place in Widnes, better known as the British
+Alkali Chemical Works.  I was working in a shed, and I had to cross
+the yard.  It was ten o'clock at night, and there was no light
+about.  While crossing the yard I felt something take hold of my leg
+and screw it off.  I became unconscious; I didn't know what became
+of me for a day or two.  On the following Sunday night I came to my
+senses, and found myself in the hospital.  I asked the nurse what
+was to do with my legs, and she told me both legs were off.
+
+There was a stationary crank in the yard, let into the ground; the
+hole was 18 inches long, 15 inches deep, and 15 inches wide.  The
+crank revolved in the hole three revolutions a minute.  There was no
+fence or covering over the hole.  Since my accident they have
+stopped it altogether, and have covered the hole up with a piece of
+sheet iron. . . . They gave me 25 pounds.  They didn't reckon that
+as compensation; they said it was only for charity's sake.  Out of
+that I paid 9 pounds for a machine by which to wheel myself about.
+
+I was labouring at the time I got my legs off.  I got twenty-four
+shillings a week, rather better pay than the other men, because I
+used to take shifts.  When there was heavy work to be done I used to
+be picked out to do it.  Mr. Manton, the manager, visited me at the
+hospital several times.  When I was getting better, I asked him if
+he would be able to find me a job.  He told me not to trouble
+myself, as the firm was not cold-hearted.  I would be right enough
+in any case . . . Mr. Manton stopped coming to see me; and the last
+time, he said he thought of asking the directors to give me a fifty-
+pound note, so I could go home to my friends in Ireland.
+
+
+Poor M'Garry!  He received rather better pay than the other men
+because he was ambitious and took shifts, and when heavy work was to
+be done he was the man picked out to do it.  And then the thing
+happened, and he went into the workhouse.  The alternative to the
+workhouse is to go home to Ireland and burden his friends for the
+rest of his life.  Comment is superfluous.
+
+It must be understood that efficiency is not determined by the
+workers themselves, but is determined by the demand for labour.  If
+three men seek one position, the most efficient man will get it.
+The other two, no matter how capable they may be, will none the less
+be inefficients.  If Germany, Japan, and the United States should
+capture the entire world market for iron, coal, and textiles, at
+once the English workers would be thrown idle by hundreds of
+thousands.  Some would emigrate, but the rest would rush their
+labour into the remaining industries.  A general shaking up of the
+workers from top to bottom would result; and when equilibrium had
+been restored, the number of the inefficients at the bottom of the
+Abyss would have been increased by hundreds of thousands.  On the
+other hand, conditions remaining constant and all the workers
+doubling their efficiency, there would still be as many
+inefficients, though each inefficient were twice as capable as he
+had been and more capable than many of the efficients had previously
+been.
+
+When there are more men to work than there is work for men to do,
+just as many men as are in excess of work will be inefficients, and
+as inefficients they are doomed to lingering and painful
+destruction.  It shall be the aim of future chapters to show, by
+their work and manner of living, not only how the inefficients are
+weeded out and destroyed, but to show how inefficients are being
+constantly and wantonly created by the forces of industrial society
+as it exists to-day.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII--WAGES
+
+
+
+When I learned that in Lesser London there were 1,292,737 people who
+received twenty-one shillings or less a week per family, I became
+interested as to how the wages could best be spent in order to
+maintain the physical efficiency of such families.  Families of six,
+seven, eight or ten being beyond consideration, I have based the
+following table upon a family of five--a father, mother, and three
+children; while I have made twenty-one shillings equivalent to
+$5.25, though actually, twenty-one shillings are equivalent to about
+$5.11.
+
+
+Rent       $1.50    or 6/0
+Bread       1.00    " 4/0
+Meat        O.87.5  " 3/6
+Vegetables  O.62.5  " 2/6
+Coals       0.25    " 1/0
+Tea         0.18    " 0/9
+Oil         0.16    " 0/8
+Sugar       0.18    " 0/9
+Milk        0.12    " 0/6
+Soap        0.08    " 0/4
+Butter      0.20    " 0/10
+Firewood    0.08    " 0/4
+Total      $5.25     21/2
+
+
+An analysis of one item alone will show how little room there is for
+waste.  Bread, $1:  for a family of five, for seven days, one
+dollar's worth of bread will give each a daily ration of 2.8 cents;
+and if they eat three meals a day, each may consume per meal 9.5
+mills' worth of bread, a little less than one halfpennyworth.  Now
+bread is the heaviest item.  They will get less of meat per mouth
+each meal, and still less of vegetates; while the smaller items
+become too microscopic for consideration.  On the other hand, these
+food articles are all bought at small retail, the most expensive and
+wasteful method of purchasing.
+
+While the table given above will permit no extravagance, no
+overloading of stomachs, it will be noticed that there is no
+surplus.  The whole guinea is spent for food and rent.  There is no
+pocket-money left over.  Does the man buy a glass of beer, the
+family must eat that much less; and in so far as it eats less, just
+that far will it impair its physical efficiency.  The members of
+this family cannot ride in busses or trams, cannot write letters,
+take outings, go to a "tu'penny gaff" for cheap vaudeville, join
+social or benefit clubs, nor can they buy sweetmeats, tobacco,
+books, or newspapers.
+
+And further, should one child (and there are three) require a pair
+of shoes, the family must strike meat for a week from its bill of
+fare.  And since there are five pairs of feet requiring shoes, and
+five heads requiring hats, and five bodies requiring clothes, and
+since there are laws regulating indecency, the family must
+constantly impair its physical efficiency in order to keep warm and
+out of jail.  For notice, when rent, coals, oil, soap, and firewood
+are extracted from the weekly income, there remains a daily
+allowance for food of 4.5d. to each person; and that 4.5d. cannot be
+lessened by buying clothes without impairing the physical
+efficiency.
+
+All of which is hard enough.  But the thing happens; the husband and
+father breaks his leg or his neck.  No 4.5d. a day per mouth for
+food is coming in; no halfpennyworth of bread per meal; and, at the
+end of the week, no six shillings for rent.  So out they must go, to
+the streets or the workhouse, or to a miserable den, somewhere, in
+which the mother will desperately endeavour to hold the family
+together on the ten shillings she may possibly be able to earn.
+
+While in London there are 1,292,737 people who receive twenty-one
+shillings or less a week per family, it must be remembered that we
+have investigated a family of five living on a twenty-one shilling
+basis.  There are larger families, there are many families that live
+on less than twenty-one shillings, and there is much irregular
+employment.  The question naturally arises, How do THEY live?  The
+answer is that they do not live.  They do not know what life is.
+They drag out a subterbestial existence until mercifully released by
+death.
+
+Before descending to the fouler depths, let the case of the
+telephone girls be cited.  Here are clean, fresh English maids, for
+whom a higher standard of living than that of the beasts is
+absolutely necessary.  Otherwise they cannot remain clean, fresh
+English maids.  On entering the service, a telephone girl receives a
+weekly wage of eleven shillings.  If she be quick and clever, she
+may, at the end of five years, attain a minimum wage of one pound.
+Recently a table of such a girl's weekly expenditure was furnished
+to Lord Londonderry.  Here it is:-
+
+                      s.   d.
+Rent, fire, and light 7    6
+Board at home         3    6
+Board at the office   4    6
+Street car fare       1    6
+Laundry               1    0
+Total                18    0
+
+
+This leaves nothing for clothes, recreation, or sickness.  And yet
+many of the girls are receiving, not eighteen shillings, but eleven
+shillings, twelve shillings, and fourteen shillings per week.  They
+must have clothes and recreation, and -
+
+
+Man to Man so oft unjust,
+Is always so to Woman.
+
+
+At the Trades Union Congress now being held in London, the
+Gasworkers' Union moved that instructions be given the Parliamentary
+Committee to introduce a Bill to prohibit the employment of children
+under fifteen years of age.  Mr. Shackleton, Member of Parliament
+and a representative of the Northern Counties Weavers, opposed the
+resolution on behalf of the textile workers, who, he said, could not
+dispense with the earnings of their children and live on the scale
+of wages which obtained.  The representatives of 514,000 workers
+voted against the resolution, while the representatives of 535,000
+workers voted in favour of it.  When 514,000 workers oppose a
+resolution prohibiting child-labour under fifteen, it is evident
+that a less-than-living wage is being paid to an immense number of
+the adult workers of the country.
+
+I have spoken with women in Whitechapel who receive right along less
+than one shilling for a twelve-hour day in the coat-making sweat
+shops; and with women trousers finishers who receive an average
+princely and weekly wage of three to four shillings.
+
+A case recently cropped up of men, in the employ of a wealthy
+business house, receiving their board and six shillings per week for
+six working days of sixteen hours each.  The sandwich men get
+fourteenpence per day and find themselves.  The average weekly
+earnings of the hawkers and costermongers are not more than ten to
+twelve shillings.  The average of all common labourers, outside the
+dockers, is less than sixteen shillings per week, while the dockers
+average from eight to nine shillings.  These figures are taken from
+a royal commission report and are authentic.
+
+Conceive of an old woman, broken and dying, supporting herself and
+four children, and paying three shillings per week rent, by making
+match boxes at 2.25d. per gross.  Twelve dozen boxes for 2.25d.,
+and, in addition, finding her own paste and thread!  She never knew
+a clay off, either for sickness, rest, or recreation.  Each day and
+every day, Sundays as well, she toiled fourteen hours.  Her day's
+stint was seven gross, for which she received 1s. 3.75d.  In the
+week of ninety-eight hours' work, she made 7066 match boxes, and
+earned 4s. 10.25d., less per paste and thread.
+
+Last year, Mr. Thomas Holmes, a police-court missionary of note,
+after writing about the condition of the women workers, received the
+following letter, dated April 18, 1901:-
+
+
+Sir,--Pardon the liberty I am taking, but, having read what you said
+about poor women working fourteen hours a day for ten shillings per
+week, I beg to state my case.  I am a tie-maker, who, after working
+all the week, cannot earn more than five shillings, and I have a
+poor afflicted husband to keep who hasn't earned a penny for more
+than ten years.
+
+
+Imagine a woman, capable of writing such a clear, sensible,
+grammatical letter, supporting her husband and self on five
+shillings per week!  Mr. Holmes visited her.  He had to squeeze to
+get into the room.  There lay her sick husband; there she worked all
+day long; there she cooked, ate, washed, and slept; and there her
+husband and she performed all the functions of living and dying.
+There was no space for the missionary to sit down, save on the bed,
+which was partially covered with ties and silk.  The sick man's
+lungs were in the last stages of decay.  He coughed and expectorated
+constantly, the woman ceasing from her work to assist him in his
+paroxysms.  The silken fluff from the ties was not good for his
+sickness; nor was his sickness good for the ties, and the handlers
+and wearers of the ties yet to come.
+
+Another case Mr. Holmes visited was that of a young girl, twelve
+years of age, charged in the police court with stealing food.  He
+found her the deputy mother of a boy of nine, a crippled boy of
+seven, and a younger child.  Her mother was a widow and a blouse-
+maker.  She paid five shillings a week rent.  Here are the last
+items in her housekeeping account:  Tea. 0.5d.; sugar, 0.5d.; bread,
+0.25d.; margarine, 1d.; oil, 1.5d.; and firewood, 1d.  Good
+housewives of the soft and tender folk, imagine yourselves marketing
+and keeping house on such a scale, setting a table for five, and
+keeping an eye on your deputy mother of twelve to see that she did
+not steal food for her little brothers and sisters, the while you
+stitched, stitched, stitched at a nightmare line of blouses, which
+stretched away into the gloom and down to the pauper's coffin a-yawn
+for you.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX--THE GHETTO
+
+
+
+Is it well that while we range with Science, glorying in the time,
+City children soak and blacken soul and sense in city slime?
+There among the gloomy alleys Progress halts on palsied feet;
+Crime and hunger cast out maidens by the thousand on the street;
+
+There the master scrimps his haggard seamstress of her daily bread;
+There the single sordid attic holds the living and the dead;
+There the smouldering fire of fever creeps across the rotted floor,
+And the crowded couch of incest, in the warrens of the poor.
+
+
+At one time the nations of Europe confined the undesirable Jews in
+city ghettos.  But to-day the dominant economic class, by less
+arbitrary but none the less rigorous methods, has confined the
+undesirable yet necessary workers into ghettos of remarkable
+meanness and vastness.  East London is such a ghetto, where the rich
+and the powerful do not dwell, and the traveller cometh not, and
+where two million workers swarm, procreate, and die.
+
+It must not be supposed that all the workers of London are crowded
+into the East End, but the tide is setting strongly in that
+direction.  The poor quarters of the city proper are constantly
+being destroyed, and the main stream of the unhoused is toward the
+east.  In the last twelve years, one district, "London over the
+Border," as it is called, which lies well beyond Aldgate,
+Whitechapel, and Mile End, has increased 260,000, or over sixty per
+cent.  The churches in this district, by the way, can seat but one
+in every thirty-seven of the added population.
+
+The City of Dreadful Monotony, the East End is often called,
+especially by well-fed, optimistic sightseers, who look over the
+surface of things and are merely shocked by the intolerable sameness
+and meanness of it all.  If the East End is worthy of no worse title
+than The City of Dreadful Monotony, and if working people are
+unworthy of variety and beauty and surprise, it would not be such a
+bad place in which to live.  But the East End does merit a worse
+title.  It should be called The City of Degradation.
+
+While it is not a city of slums, as some people imagine, it may well
+be said to be one gigantic slum.  From the standpoint of simple
+decency and clean manhood and womanhood, any mean street, of all its
+mean streets, is a slum.  Where sights and sounds abound which
+neither you nor I would care to have our children see and hear is a
+place where no man's children should live, and see, and hear.  Where
+you and I would not care to have our wives pass their lives is a
+place where no other man's wife should have to pass her life.  For
+here, in the East End, the obscenities and brute vulgarities of life
+are rampant.  There is no privacy.  The bad corrupts the good, and
+all fester together.  Innocent childhood is sweet and beautiful:
+but in East London innocence is a fleeting thing, and you must catch
+them before they crawl out of the cradle, or you will find the very
+babes as unholily wise as you.
+
+The application of the Golden Rule determines that East London is an
+unfit place in which to live.  Where you would not have your own
+babe live, and develop, and gather to itself knowledge of life and
+the things of life, is not a fit place for the babes of other men to
+live, and develop, and gather to themselves knowledge of life and
+the things of life.  It is a simple thing, this Golden Rule, and all
+that is required.  Political economy and the survival of the fittest
+can go hang if they say otherwise.  What is not good enough for you
+is not good enough for other men, and there's no more to be said.
+
+There are 300,000 people in London, divided into families, that live
+in one-room tenements.  Far, far more live in two and three rooms
+and are as badly crowded, regardless of sex, as those that live in
+one room.  The law demands 400 cubic feet of space for each person.
+In army barracks each soldier is allowed 600 cubic feet.  Professor
+Huxley, at one time himself a medical officer in East London, always
+held that each person should have 800 cubic feet of space, and that
+it should be well ventilated with pure air.  Yet in London there are
+900,000 people living in less than the 400 cubic feet prescribed by
+the law.
+
+Mr. Charles Booth, who engaged in a systematic work of years in
+charting and classifying the toiling city population, estimates that
+there are 1,800,000 people in London who are POOR and VERY POOR.  It
+is of interest to mark what he terms poor.  By POOR he means
+families which have a total weekly income of from eighteen to
+twenty-one shillings.  The VERY POOR fall greatly below this
+standard.
+
+The workers, as a class, are being more and more segregated by their
+economic masters; and this process, with its jamming and
+overcrowding, tends not so much toward immorality as unmorality.
+Here is an extract from a recent meeting of the London County
+Council, terse and bald, but with a wealth of horror to be read
+between the lines:-
+
+
+Mr. Bruce asked the Chairman of the Public Health Committee whether
+his attention had been called to a number of cases of serious
+overcrowding in the East End.  In St. Georges-in-the-East a man and
+his wife and their family of eight occupied one small room.  This
+family consisted of five daughters, aged twenty, seventeen, eight,
+four, and an infant; and three sons, aged fifteen, thirteen, and
+twelve.  In Whitechapel a man and his wife and their three
+daughters, aged sixteen, eight, and four, and two sons, aged ten and
+twelve years, occupied a smaller room.  In Bethnal Green a man and
+his wife, with four sons, aged twenty-three, twenty-one, nineteen,
+and sixteen, and two daughters, aged fourteen and seven, were also
+found in one room.  He asked whether it was not the duty of the
+various local authorities to prevent such serious overcrowding.
+
+
+But with 900,000 people actually living under illegal conditions,
+the authorities have their hands full.  When the overcrowded folk
+are ejected they stray off into some other hole; and, as they move
+their belongings by night, on hand-barrows (one hand-barrow
+accommodating the entire household goods and the sleeping children),
+it is next to impossible to keep track of them.  If the Public
+Health Act of 1891 were suddenly and completely enforced, 900,000
+people would receive notice to clear out of their houses and go on
+to the streets, and 500,000 rooms would have to be built before they
+were all legally housed again.
+
+The mean streets merely look mean from the outside, but inside the
+walls are to be found squalor, misery, and tragedy.  While the
+following tragedy may be revolting to read, it must not be forgotten
+that the existence of it is far more revolting.
+
+In Devonshire Place, Lisson Grove, a short while back died an old
+woman of seventy-five years of age.  At the inquest the coroner's
+officer stated that "all he found in the room was a lot of old rags
+covered with vermin.  He had got himself smothered with the vermin.
+The room was in a shocking condition, and he had never seen anything
+like it.  Everything was absolutely covered with vermin."
+
+The doctor said:  "He found deceased lying across the fender on her
+back.  She had one garment and her stockings on.  The body was quite
+alive with vermin, and all the clothes in the room were absolutely
+grey with insects.  Deceased was very badly nourished and was very
+emaciated.  She had extensive sores on her legs, and her stockings
+were adherent to those sores.  The sores were the result of vermin."
+
+A man present at the inquest wrote:  "I had the evil fortune to see
+the body of the unfortunate woman as it lay in the mortuary; and
+even now the memory of that gruesome sight makes me shudder.  There
+she lay in the mortuary shell, so starved and emaciated that she was
+a mere bundle of skin and bones.  Her hair, which was matted with
+filth, was simply a nest of vermin.  Over her bony chest leaped and
+rolled hundreds, thousands, myriads of vermin!"
+
+If it is not good for your mother and my mother so to die, then it
+is not good for this woman, whosoever's mother she might be, so to
+die.
+
+Bishop Wilkinson, who has lived in Zululand, recently said, "No
+human of an African village would allow such a promiscuous mixing of
+young men and women, boys and girls."  He had reference to the
+children of the overcrowded folk, who at five have nothing to learn
+and much to unlearn which they will never unlearn.
+
+It is notorious that here in the Ghetto the houses of the poor are
+greater profit earners than the mansions of the rich.  Not only does
+the poor worker have to live like a beast, but he pays
+proportionately more for it than does the rich man for his spacious
+comfort.  A class of house-sweaters has been made possible by the
+competition of the poor for houses.  There are more people than
+there is room, and numbers are in the workhouse because they cannot
+find shelter elsewhere.  Not only are houses let, but they are
+sublet, and sub-sublet down to the very rooms.
+
+"A part of a room to let."  This notice was posted a short while ago
+in a window not five minutes' walk from St. James's Hall.  The Rev.
+Hugh Price Hughes is authority for the statement that beds are let
+on the three-relay system--that is, three tenants to a bed, each
+occupying it eight hours, so that it never grows cold; while the
+floor space underneath the bed is likewise let on the three-relay
+system.  Health officers are not at all unused to finding such cases
+as the following:  in one room having a cubic capacity of 1000 feet,
+three adult females in the bed, and two adult females under the bed;
+and in one room of 1650 cubic feet, one adult male and two children
+in the bed, and two adult females under the bed.
+
+Here is a typical example of a room on the more respectable two-
+relay system.  It is occupied in the daytime by a young woman
+employed all night in a hotel.  At seven o'clock in the evening she
+vacates the room, and a bricklayer's labourer comes in.  At seven in
+the morning he vacates, and goes to his work, at which time she
+returns from hers.
+
+The Rev. W. N. Davies, rector of Spitalfields, took a census of some
+of the alleys in his parish.  He says:-
+
+
+In one alley there are ten houses--fifty-one rooms, nearly all about
+8 feet by 9 feet--and 254 people.  In six instances only do 2 people
+occupy one room; and in others the number varied from 3 to 9.  In
+another court with six houses and twenty-two rooms were 84 people--
+again 6, 7, 8, and 9 being the number living in one room, in several
+instances.  In one house with eight rooms are 45 people--one room
+containing 9 persons, one 8, two 7, and another 6.
+
+
+This Ghetto crowding is not through inclination, but compulsion.
+Nearly fifty per cent. of the workers pay from one-fourth to one-
+half of their earnings for rent.  The average rent in the larger
+part of the East End is from four to six shillings per week for one
+room, while skilled mechanics, earning thirty-five shillings per
+week, are forced to part with fifteen shillings of it for two or
+three pokey little dens, in which they strive desperately to obtain
+some semblance of home life.  And rents are going up all the time.
+In one street in Stepney the increase in only two years has been
+from thirteen to eighteen shillings; in another street from eleven
+to sixteen shillings; and in another street, from eleven to fifteen
+shillings; while in Whitechapel, two-room houses that recently
+rented for ten shillings are now costing twenty-one shillings.
+East, west, north, and south the rents are going up.  When land is
+worth from 20,000 pounds to 30,000 pounds an acre, some one must pay
+the landlord.
+
+Mr. W. C. Steadman, in the House of Commons, in a speech concerning
+his constituency in Stepney, related the following:-
+
+
+This morning, not a hundred yards from where I am myself living, a
+widow stopped me.  She has six children to support, and the rent of
+her house was fourteen shillings per week.  She gets her living by
+letting the house to lodgers and doing a day's washing or charring.
+That woman, with tears in her eyes, told me that the landlord had
+increased the rent from fourteen shillings to eighteen shillings.
+What could the woman do?  There is no accommodation in Stepney.
+Every place is taken up and overcrowded.
+
+
+Class supremacy can rest only on class degradation; and when the
+workers are segregated in the Ghetto, they cannot escape the
+consequent degradation.  A short and stunted people is created--a
+breed strikingly differentiated from their masters' breed, a
+pavement folk, as it were lacking stamina and strength.  The men
+become caricatures of what physical men ought to be, and their women
+and children are pale and anaemic, with eyes ringed darkly, who
+stoop and slouch, and are early twisted out of all shapeliness and
+beauty.
+
+To make matters worse, the men of the Ghetto are the men who are
+left--a deteriorated stock, left to undergo still further
+deterioration.  For a hundred and fifty years, at least, they have
+been drained of their best.  The strong men, the men of pluck,
+initiative, and ambition, have been faring forth to the fresher and
+freer portions of the globe, to make new lands and nations.  Those
+who are lacking, the weak of heart and head and hand, as well as the
+rotten and hopeless, have remained to carry on the breed.  And year
+by year, in turn, the best they breed are taken from them.  Wherever
+a man of vigour and stature manages to grow up, he is haled
+forthwith into the army.  A soldier, as Bernard Shaw has said,
+"ostensibly a heroic and patriotic defender of his country, is
+really an unfortunate man driven by destitution to offer himself as
+food for powder for the sake of regular rations, shelter, and
+clothing."
+
+This constant selection of the best from the workers has
+impoverished those who are left, a sadly degraded remainder, for the
+great part, which, in the Ghetto, sinks to the deepest depths.  The
+wine of life has been drawn off to spill itself in blood and progeny
+over the rest of the earth.  Those that remain are the lees, and
+they are segregated and steeped in themselves.  They become indecent
+and bestial.  When they kill, they kill with their hands, and then
+stupidly surrender themselves to the executioners.  There is no
+splendid audacity about their transgressions.  They gouge a mate
+with a dull knife, or beat his head in with an iron pot, and then
+sit down and wait for the police.  Wife-beating is the masculine
+prerogative of matrimony.  They wear remarkable boots of brass and
+iron, and when they have polished off the mother of their children
+with a black eye or so, they knock her down and proceed to trample
+her very much as a Western stallion tramples a rattlesnake.
+
+A woman of the lower Ghetto classes is as much the slave of her
+husband as is the Indian squaw.  And I, for one, were I a woman and
+had but the two choices, should prefer being a squaw.  The men are
+economically dependent on their masters, and the women are
+economically dependent on the men.  The result is, the woman gets
+the beating the man should give his master, and she can do nothing.
+There are the kiddies, and he is the breadwinner, and she dare not
+send him to jail and leave herself and children to starve.  Evidence
+to convict can rarely be obtained when such cases come into the
+courts; as a rule, the trampled wife and mother is weeping and
+hysterically beseeching the magistrate to let her husband off for
+the kiddies' sakes.
+
+The wives become screaming harridans or, broken-spirited and
+doglike, lose what little decency and self-respect they have
+remaining over from their maiden days, and all sink together,
+unheeding, in their degradation and dirt.
+
+Sometimes I become afraid of my own generalizations upon the massed
+misery of this Ghetto life, and feel that my impressions are
+exaggerated, that I am too close to the picture and lack
+perspective.  At such moments I find it well to turn to the
+testimony of other men to prove to myself that I am not becoming
+over-wrought and addle-pated.  Frederick Harrison has always struck
+me as being a level-headed, well-controlled man, and he says:-
+
+
+To me, at least, it would be enough to condemn modern society as
+hardly an advance on slavery or serfdom, if the permanent condition
+of industry were to be that which we behold, that ninety per cent.
+of the actual producers of wealth have no home that they can call
+their own beyond the end of the week; have no bit of soil, or so
+much as a room that belongs to them; have nothing of value of any
+kind, except as much old furniture as will go into a cart; have the
+precarious chance of weekly wages, which barely suffice to keep them
+in health; are housed, for the most part, in places that no man
+thinks fit for his horse; are separated by so narrow a margin from
+destitution that a month of bad trade, sickness, or unexpected loss
+brings them face to face with hunger and pauperism . . . But below
+this normal state of the average workman in town and country, there
+is found the great band of destitute outcasts--the camp followers of
+the army of industry--at least one-tenth the whole proletarian
+population, whose normal condition is one of sickening wretchedness.
+If this is to be the permanent arrangement of modern society,
+civilization must be held to bring a curse on the great majority of
+mankind.
+
+
+Ninety per cent.!  The figures are appalling, yet Mr. Stopford
+Brooke, after drawing a frightful London picture, finds himself
+compelled to multiply it by half a million.  Here it is:-
+
+
+I often used to meet, when I was curate at Kensington, families
+drifting into London along the Hammersmith Road.  One day there came
+along a labourer and his wife, his son and two daughters.  Their
+family had lived for a long time on an estate in the country, and
+managed, with the help of the common-land and their labour, to get
+on.  But the time came when the common was encroached upon, and
+their labour was not needed on the estate, and they were quietly
+turned out of their cottage.  Where should they go?  Of course to
+London, where work was thought to be plentiful.  They had a little
+savings, and they thought they could get two decent rooms to live
+in.  But the inexorable land question met them in London.  They
+tried the decent courts for lodgings, and found that two rooms would
+cost ten shillings a week.  Food was dear and bad, water was bad,
+and in a short time their health suffered.  Work was hard to get,
+and its wage was so low that they were soon in debt.  They became
+more ill and more despairing with the poisonous surroundings, the
+darkness, and the long hours of work; and they were driven forth to
+seek a cheaper lodging.  They found it in a court I knew well--a
+hotbed of crime and nameless horrors.  In this they got a single
+room at a cruel rent, and work was more difficult for them to get
+now, as they came from a place of such bad repute, and they fell
+into the hands of those who sweat the last drop out of man and woman
+and child, for wages which are the food only of despair.  And the
+darkness and the dirt, the bad food and the sickness, and the want
+of water was worse than before; and the crowd and the companionship
+of the court robbed them of the last shreds of self-respect.  The
+drink demon seized upon them.  Of course there was a public-house at
+both ends of the court.  There they fled, one and all, for shelter,
+and warmth, and society, and forgetfulness.  And they came out in
+deeper debt, with inflamed senses and burning brains, and an
+unsatisfied craving for drink they would do anything to satiate.
+And in a few months the father was in prison, the wife dying, the
+son a criminal, and the daughters on the street.  MULTIPLY THIS BY
+HALF A MILLION, AND YOU WILL BE BENEATH THE TRUTH.
+
+
+No more dreary spectacle can be found on this earth than the whole
+of the "awful East," with its Whitechapel, Hoxton, Spitalfields,
+Bethnal Green, and Wapping to the East India Docks.  The colour of
+life is grey and drab.  Everything is helpless, hopeless,
+unrelieved, and dirty.  Bath tubs are a thing totally unknown, as
+mythical as the ambrosia of the gods.  The people themselves are
+dirty, while any attempt at cleanliness becomes howling farce, when
+it is not pitiful and tragic.  Strange, vagrant odours come drifting
+along the greasy wind, and the rain, when it falls, is more like
+grease than water from heaven.  The very cobblestones are scummed
+with grease.
+
+Here lives a population as dull and unimaginative as its long grey
+miles of dingy brick.  Religion has virtually passed it by, and a
+gross and stupid materialism reigns, fatal alike to the things of
+the spirit and the finer instincts of life.
+
+It used to be the proud boast that every Englishman's home was his
+castle.  But to-day it is an anachronism.  The Ghetto folk have no
+homes.  They do not know the significance and the sacredness of home
+life.  Even the municipal dwellings, where live the better-class
+workers, are overcrowded barracks.  They have no home life.  The
+very language proves it.  The father returning from work asks his
+child in the street where her mother is; and back the answer comes,
+"In the buildings."
+
+A new race has sprung up, a street people.  They pass their lives at
+work and in the streets.  They have dens and lairs into which to
+crawl for sleeping purposes, and that is all.  One cannot travesty
+the word by calling such dens and lairs "homes."  The traditional
+silent and reserved Englishman has passed away.  The pavement folk
+are noisy, voluble, high-strung, excitable--when they are yet young.
+As they grow older they become steeped and stupefied in beer.  When
+they have nothing else to do, they ruminate as a cow ruminates.
+They are to be met with everywhere, standing on curbs and corners,
+and staring into vacancy.  Watch one of them.  He will stand there,
+motionless, for hours, and when you go away you will leave him still
+staring into vacancy.  It is most absorbing.  He has no money for
+beer, and his lair is only for sleeping purposes, so what else
+remains for him to do?  He has already solved the mysteries of
+girl's love, and wife's love, and child's love, and found them
+delusions and shams, vain and fleeting as dew-drops, quick-vanishing
+before the ferocious facts of life.
+
+As I say, the young are high-strung, nervous, excitable; the middle-
+aged are empty-headed, stolid, and stupid.  It is absurd to think
+for an instant that they can compete with the workers of the New
+World.  Brutalised, degraded, and dull, the Ghetto folk will be
+unable to render efficient service to England in the world struggle
+for industrial supremacy which economists declare has already begun.
+Neither as workers nor as soldiers can they come up to the mark when
+England, in her need, calls upon them, her forgotten ones; and if
+England be flung out of the world's industrial orbit, they will
+perish like flies at the end of summer.  Or, with England critically
+situated, and with them made desperate as wild beasts are made
+desperate, they may become a menace and go "swelling" down to the
+West End to return the "slumming" the West End has done in the East.
+In which case, before rapid-fire guns and the modern machinery of
+warfare, they will perish the more swiftly and easily.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX--COFFEE-HOUSES AND DOSS-HOUSES
+
+
+
+Another phrase gone glimmering, shorn of romance and tradition and
+all that goes to make phrases worth keeping!  For me, henceforth,
+"coffee-house" will possess anything but an agreeable connotation.
+Over on the other side of the world, the mere mention of the word
+was sufficient to conjure up whole crowds of its historic
+frequenters, and to send trooping through my imagination endless
+groups of wits and dandies, pamphleteers and bravos, and bohemians
+of Grub Street.
+
+But here, on this side of the world, alas and alack, the very name
+is a misnomer.  Coffee-house:  a place where people drink coffee.
+Not at all.  You cannot obtain coffee in such a place for love or
+money.  True, you may call for coffee, and you will have brought you
+something in a cup purporting to be coffee, and you will taste it
+and be disillusioned, for coffee it certainly is not.
+
+And what is true of the coffee is true of the coffee-house.
+Working-men, in the main, frequent these places, and greasy, dirty
+places they are, without one thing about them to cherish decency in
+a man or put self-respect into him.  Table-cloths and napkins are
+unknown.  A man eats in the midst of the debris left by his
+predecessor, and dribbles his own scraps about him and on the floor.
+In rush times, in such places, I have positively waded through the
+muck and mess that covered the floor, and I have managed to eat
+because I was abominably hungry and capable of eating anything.
+
+This seems to be the normal condition of the working-man, from the
+zest with which he addresses himself to the board.  Eating is a
+necessity, and there are no frills about it.  He brings in with him
+a primitive voraciousness, and, I am confident, carries away with
+him a fairly healthy appetite.  When you see such a man, on his way
+to work in the morning, order a pint of tea, which is no more tea
+than it is ambrosia, pull a hunk of dry bread from his pocket, and
+wash the one down with the other, depend upon it, that man has not
+the right sort of stuff in his belly, nor enough of the wrong sort
+of stuff, to fit him for big day's work.  And further, depend upon
+it, he and a thousand of his kind will not turn out the quantity or
+quality of work that a thousand men will who have eaten heartily of
+meat and potatoes, and drunk coffee that is coffee.
+
+As a vagrant in the "Hobo" of a California jail, I have been served
+better food and drink than the London workman receives in his
+coffee-houses; while as an American labourer I have eaten a
+breakfast for twelvepence such as the British labourer would not
+dream of eating.  Of course, he will pay only three or four pence
+for his; which is, however, as much as I paid, for I would be
+earning six shillings to his two or two and a half.  On the other
+hand, though, and in return, I would turn out an amount of work in
+the course of the day that would put to shame the amount he turned
+out.  So there are two sides to it.  The man with the high standard
+of living will always do more work and better than the man with the
+low standard of living.
+
+There is a comparison which sailormen make between the English and
+American merchant services.  In an English ship, they say, it is
+poor grub, poor pay, and easy work; in an American ship, good grub,
+good pay, and hard work.  And this is applicable to the working
+populations of both countries.  The ocean greyhounds have to pay for
+speed and steam, and so does the workman.  But if the workman is not
+able to pay for it, he will not have the speed and steam, that is
+all.  The proof of it is when the English workman comes to America.
+He will lay more bricks in New York than he will in London, still
+more bricks in St. Louis, and still more bricks when he gets to San
+Francisco. {3}  His standard of living has been rising all the time.
+
+Early in the morning, along the streets frequented by workmen on the
+way to work, many women sit on the side-walk with sacks of bread
+beside them.  No end of workmen purchase these, and eat them as they
+walk along.  They do not even wash the dry bread down with the tea
+to be obtained for a penny in the coffee-houses.  It is
+incontestable that a man is not fit to begin his day's work on a
+meal like that; and it is equally incontestable that the loss will
+fall upon his employer and upon the nation.  For some time, now,
+statesmen have been crying, "Wake up, England!"  It would show more
+hard-headed common sense if they changed the tune to "Feed up,
+England!"
+
+Not only is the worker poorly fed, but he is filthily fed.  I have
+stood outside a butcher-shop and watched a horde of speculative
+housewives turning over the trimmings and scraps and shreds of beef
+and mutton--dog-meat in the States.  I would not vouch for the clean
+fingers of these housewives, no more than I would vouch for the
+cleanliness of the single rooms in which many of them and their
+families lived; yet they raked, and pawed, and scraped the mess
+about in their anxiety to get the worth of their coppers.  I kept my
+eye on one particularly offensive-looking bit of meat, and followed
+it through the clutches of over twenty women, till it fell to the
+lot of a timid-appearing little woman whom the butcher bluffed into
+taking it.  All day long this heap of scraps was added to and taken
+away from, the dust and dirt of the street falling upon it, flies
+settling on it, and the dirty fingers turning it over and over.
+
+The costers wheel loads of specked and decaying fruit around in the
+barrows all day, and very often store it in their one living and
+sleeping room for the night.  There it is exposed to the sickness
+and disease, the effluvia and vile exhalations of overcrowded and
+rotten life, and next day it is carted about again to be sold.
+
+The poor worker of the East End never knows what it is to eat good,
+wholesome meat or fruit--in fact, he rarely eats meat or fruit at
+all; while the skilled workman has nothing to boast of in the way of
+what he eats.  Judging from the coffee-houses, which is a fair
+criterion, they never know in all their lives what tea, coffee, or
+cocoa tastes like.  The slops and water-witcheries of the coffee-
+houses, varying only in sloppiness and witchery, never even
+approximate or suggest what you and I are accustomed to drink as tea
+and coffee.
+
+A little incident comes to me, connected with a coffee-house not far
+from Jubilee Street on the Mile End Road.
+
+"Cawn yer let me 'ave somethin' for this, daughter?  Anythin', Hi
+don't mind.  Hi 'aven't 'ad a bite the blessed dy, an' Hi'm that
+fynt . . . "
+
+She was an old woman, clad in decent black rags, and in her hand she
+held a penny.  The one she had addressed as "daughter" was a
+careworn woman of forty, proprietress and waitress of the house.
+
+I waited, possibly as anxiously as the old woman, to see how the
+appeal would be received.  It was four in the afternoon, and she
+looked faint and sick.  The woman hesitated an instant, then brought
+a large plate of "stewed lamb and young peas."  I was eating a plate
+of it myself, and it is my judgment that the lamb was mutton and
+that the peas might have been younger without being youthful.
+However, the point is, the dish was sold at sixpence, and the
+proprietress gave it for a penny, demonstrating anew the old truth
+that the poor are the most charitable.
+
+The old woman, profuse in her gratitude, took a seat on the other
+side of the narrow table and ravenously attacked the smoking stew.
+We ate steadily and silently, the pair of us, when suddenly,
+explosively and most gleefully, she cried out to me, -
+
+"Hi sold a box o' matches!  Yus," she confirmed, if anything with
+greater and more explosive glee.  "Hi sold a box o' matches!  That's
+'ow Hi got the penny."
+
+"You must be getting along in years," I suggested.
+
+"Seventy-four yesterday," she replied, and returned with gusto to
+her plate.
+
+"Blimey, I'd like to do something for the old girl, that I would,
+but this is the first I've 'ad to-dy," the young fellow alongside
+volunteered to me.  "An' I only 'ave this because I 'appened to make
+an odd shilling washin' out, Lord lumme! I don't know 'ow many
+pots."
+
+"No work at my own tryde for six weeks," he said further, in reply
+to my questions; "nothin' but odd jobs a blessed long wy between."
+
+
+One meets with all sorts of adventures in coffee-house, and I shall
+not soon forget a Cockney Amazon in a place near Trafalgar Square,
+to whom I tendered a sovereign when paying my score.  (By the way,
+one is supposed to pay before he begins to eat, and if he be poorly
+dressed he is compelled to pay before he eats).
+
+The girl bit the gold piece between her teeth, rang it on the
+counter, and then looked me and my rags witheringly up and down.
+
+"Where'd you find it?" she at length demanded.
+
+"Some mug left it on the table when he went out, eh, don't you
+think?" I retorted.
+
+"Wot's yer gyme?" she queried, looking me calmly in the eyes.
+
+"I makes 'em," quoth I.
+
+She sniffed superciliously and gave me the change in small silver,
+and I had my revenge by biting and ringing every piece of it.
+
+"I'll give you a ha'penny for another lump of sugar in the tea," I
+said.
+
+"I'll see you in 'ell first," came the retort courteous.  Also, she
+amplified the retort courteous in divers vivid and unprintable ways.
+
+I never had much talent for repartee, but she knocked silly what
+little I had, and I gulped down my tea a beaten man, while she
+gloated after me even as I passed out to the street.
+
+While 300,000 people of London live in one-room tenements, and
+900,000 are illegally and viciously housed, 38,000 more are
+registered as living in common lodging-houses--known in the
+vernacular as "doss-houses."  There are many kinds of doss-houses,
+but in one thing they are all alike, from the filthy little ones to
+the monster big ones paying five per cent. and blatantly lauded by
+smug middle-class men who know but one thing about them, and that
+one thing is their uninhabitableness.  By this I do not mean that
+the roofs leak or the walls are draughty; but what I do mean is that
+life in them is degrading and unwholesome.
+
+"The poor man's hotel," they are often called, but the phrase is
+caricature.  Not to possess a room to one's self, in which sometimes
+to sit alone; to be forced out of bed willy-nilly, the first thing
+in the morning; to engage and pay anew for a bed each night; and
+never to have any privacy, surely is a mode of existence quite
+different from that of hotel life.
+
+This must not be considered a sweeping condemnation of the big
+private and municipal lodging-houses and working-men's homes.  Far
+from it.  They have remedied many of the atrocities attendant upon
+the irresponsible small doss-houses, and they give the workman more
+for his money than he ever received before; but that does not make
+them as habitable or wholesome as the dwelling-place of a man should
+be who does his work in the world.
+
+The little private doss-houses, as a rule, are unmitigated horrors.
+I have slept in them, and I know; but let me pass them by and
+confine myself to the bigger and better ones.  Not far from
+Middlesex Street, Whitechapel, I entered such a house, a place
+inhabited almost entirely by working men.  The entrance was by way
+of a flight of steps descending from the side-walk to what was
+properly the cellar of the building.  Here were two large and
+gloomily lighted rooms, in which men cooked and ate.  I had intended
+to do some cooking myself, but the smell of the place stole away my
+appetite, or, rather, wrested it from me; so I contented myself with
+watching other men cook and eat.
+
+One workman, home from work, sat down opposite me at the rough
+wooden table, and began his meal.  A handful of salt on the not
+over-clean table constituted his butter.  Into it he dipped his
+bread, mouthful by mouthful, and washed it down with tea from a big
+mug.  A piece of fish completed his bill of fare.  He ate silently,
+looking neither to right nor left nor across at me.  Here and there,
+at the various tables, other men were eating, just as silently.  In
+the whole room there was hardly a note of conversation.  A feeling
+of gloom pervaded the ill-lighted place.  Many of them sat and
+brooded over the crumbs of their repast, and made me wonder, as
+Childe Roland wondered, what evil they had done that they should be
+punished so.
+
+From the kitchen came the sounds of more genial life, and I ventured
+into the range where the men were cooking.  But the smell I had
+noticed on entering was stronger here, and a rising nausea drove me
+into the street for fresh air.
+
+On my return I paid fivepence for a "cabin," took my receipt for the
+same in the form of a huge brass check, and went upstairs to the
+smoking-room.  Here, a couple of small billiard tables and several
+checkerboards were being used by young working-men, who waited in
+relays for their turn at the games, while many men were sitting
+around, smoking, reading, and mending their clothes.  The young men
+were hilarious, the old men were gloomy.  In fact, there were two
+types of men, the cheerful and the sodden or blue, and age seemed to
+determine the classification.
+
+But no more than the two cellar rooms did this room convey the
+remotest suggestion of home.  Certainly there could be nothing home-
+like about it to you and me, who know what home really is.  On the
+walls were the most preposterous and insulting notices regulating
+the conduct of the guests, and at ten o'clock the lights were put
+out, and nothing remained but bed.  This was gained by descending
+again to the cellar, by surrendering the brass check to a burly
+doorkeeper, and by climbing a long flight of stairs into the upper
+regions.  I went to the top of the building and down again, passing
+several floors filled with sleeping men.  The "cabins" were the best
+accommodation, each cabin allowing space for a tiny bed and room
+alongside of it in which to undress.  The bedding was clean, and
+with neither it nor the bed do I find any fault.  But there was no
+privacy about it, no being alone.
+
+To get an adequate idea of a floor filled with cabins, you have
+merely to magnify a layer of the pasteboard pigeon-holes of an egg-
+crate till each pigeon-hole is seven feet in height and otherwise
+properly dimensioned, then place the magnified layer on the floor of
+a large, barnlike room, and there you have it.  There are no
+ceilings to the pigeon-holes, the walls are thin, and the snores
+from all the sleepers and every move and turn of your nearer
+neighbours come plainly to your ears.  And this cabin is yours only
+for a little while.  In the morning out you go.  You cannot put your
+trunk in it, or come and go when you like, or lock the door behind
+you, or anything of the sort.  In fact, there is no door at all,
+only a doorway.  If you care to remain a guest in this poor man's
+hotel, you must put up with all this, and with prison regulations
+which impress upon you constantly that you are nobody, with little
+soul of your own and less to say about it.
+
+Now I contend that the least a man who does his day's work should
+have is a room to himself, where he can lock the door and be safe in
+his possessions; where he can sit down and read by a window or look
+out; where he can come and go whenever he wishes; where he can
+accumulate a few personal belongings other than those he carries
+about with him on his back and in his pockets; where he can hang up
+pictures of his mother, sister, sweet-heart, ballet dancers, or
+bulldogs, as his heart listeth--in short, one place of his own on
+the earth of which he can say:  "This is mine, my castle; the world
+stops at the threshold; here am I lord and master."  He will be a
+better citizen, this man; and he will do a better day's work.
+
+I stood on one floor of the poor man's hotel and listened.  I went
+from bed to bed and looked at the sleepers.  They were young men,
+from twenty to forty, most of them.  Old men cannot afford the
+working-man's home.  They go to the workhouse.  But I looked at the
+young men, scores of them, and they were not bad-looking fellows.
+Their faces were made for women's kisses, their necks for women's
+arms.  They were lovable, as men are lovable.  They were capable of
+love.  A woman's touch redeems and softens, and they needed such
+redemption and softening instead of each day growing harsh and
+harsher.  And I wondered where these women were, and heard a
+"harlot's ginny laugh."  Leman Street, Waterloo Road, Piccadilly,
+The Strand, answered me, and I knew where they were.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI--THE PRECARIOUSNESS OF LIFE
+
+
+
+I was talking with a very vindictive man.  In his opinion, his wife
+had wronged him and the law had wronged him.  The merits and morals
+of the case are immaterial.  The meat of the matter is that she had
+obtained a separation, and he was compelled to pay ten shillings
+each week for the support of her and the five children.  "But look
+you," said he to me, "wot'll 'appen to 'er if I don't py up the ten
+shillings?  S'posin', now, just s'posin' a accident 'appens to me,
+so I cawn't work.  S'posin' I get a rupture, or the rheumatics, or
+the cholera.  Wot's she goin' to do, eh?  Wot's she goin' to do?"
+
+He shook his head sadly.  "No 'ope for 'er.  The best she cawn do is
+the work'ouse, an' that's 'ell.  An' if she don't go to the
+work'ouse, it'll be a worse 'ell.  Come along 'ith me an' I'll show
+you women sleepin' in a passage, a dozen of 'em.  An' I'll show you
+worse, wot she'll come to if anythin' 'appens to me and the ten
+shillings."
+
+The certitude of this man's forecast is worthy of consideration.  He
+knew conditions sufficiently to know the precariousness of his
+wife's grasp on food and shelter.  For her game was up when his
+working capacity was impaired or destroyed.  And when this state of
+affairs is looked at in its larger aspect, the same will be found
+true of hundreds of thousands and even millions of men and women
+living amicably together and co-operating in the pursuit of food and
+shelter.
+
+The figures are appalling:  1,800,000 people in London live on the
+poverty line and below it, and 1,000,000 live with one week's wages
+between them and pauperism.  In all England and Wales, eighteen per
+cent. of the whole population are driven to the parish for relief,
+and in London, according to the statistics of the London County
+Council, twenty-one per cent. of the whole population are driven to
+the parish for relief.  Between being driven to the parish for
+relief and being an out-and-out pauper there is a great difference,
+yet London supports 123,000 paupers, quite a city of folk in
+themselves.  One in every four in London dies on public charity,
+while 939 out of every 1000 in the United Kingdom die in poverty;
+8,000,000 simply struggle on the ragged edge of starvation, and
+20,000,000 more are not comfortable in the simple and clean sense of
+the word.
+
+It is interesting to go more into detail concerning the London
+people who die on charity.
+
+In 1886, and up to 1893, the percentage of pauperism to population
+was less in London than in all England; but since 1893, and for
+every succeeding year, the percentage of pauperism to population has
+been greater in London than in all England.  Yet, from the
+Registrar-General's Report for 1886, the following figures are
+taken:-
+
+
+Out of 81,951 deaths in London (1884):-
+
+
+In workhouses            9,909
+In hospitals             6,559
+In lunatic asylums         278
+Total in public refuges 16,746
+
+
+Commenting on these figures, a Fabian writer says:  "Considering
+that comparatively few of these are children, it is probable that
+one in every three London adults will be driven into one of these
+refuges to die, and the proportion in the case of the manual labour
+class must of course be still larger."
+
+These figures serve somewhat to indicate the proximity of the
+average worker to pauperism.  Various things make pauperism.  An
+advertisement, for instance, such as this, appearing in yesterday
+morning's paper:-
+
+"Clerk wanted, with knowledge of shorthand, typewriting, and
+invoicing:  wages ten shillings ($2.50) a week.  Apply by letter,"
+&c.
+
+And in to-day's paper I read of a clerk, thirty-five years of age
+and an inmate of a London workhouse, brought before a magistrate for
+non-performance of task.  He claimed that he had done his various
+tasks since he had been an inmate; but when the master set him to
+breaking stones, his hands blistered, and he could not finish the
+task.  He had never been used to an implement heavier than a pen, he
+said.  The magistrate sentenced him and his blistered hands to seven
+days' hard labour.
+
+Old age, of course, makes pauperism.  And then there is the
+accident, the thing happening, the death or disablement of the
+husband, father, and bread-winner.  Here is a man, with a wife and
+three children, living on the ticklish security of twenty shillings
+per week--and there are hundreds of thousands of such families in
+London.  Perforce, to even half exist, they must live up to the last
+penny of it, so that a week's wages (one pound) is all that stands
+between this family and pauperism or starvation.  The thing happens,
+the father is struck down, and what then?  A mother with three
+children can do little or nothing.  Either she must hand her
+children over to society as juvenile paupers, in order to be free to
+do something adequate for herself, or she must go to the sweat-shops
+for work which she can perform in the vile den possible to her
+reduced income.  But with the sweat-shops, married women who eke out
+their husband's earnings, and single women who have but themselves
+miserably to support, determine the scale of wages.  And this scale
+of wages, so determined, is so low that the mother and her three
+children can live only in positive beastliness and semi-starvation,
+till decay and death end their suffering.
+
+To show that this mother, with her three children to support, cannot
+compete in the sweating industries, I instance from the current
+newspapers the two following cases:-
+
+A father indignantly writes that his daughter and a girl companion
+receive 8.5d. per gross for making boxes.  They made each day four
+gross.  Their expenses were 8d. for car fare, 2d. for stamps, 2.5d.
+for glue, and 1d. for string, so that all they earned between them
+was 1s. 9d., or a daily wage each of 10.5d.
+
+In the second ewe, before the Luton Guardians a few days ago, an old
+woman of seventy-two appeared, asking for relief.  "She was a straw-
+hat maker, but had been compelled to give up the work owing to the
+price she obtained for them--namely, 2.25d. each.  For that price
+she had to provide plait trimmings and make and finish the hats."
+
+Yet this mother and her three children we are considering have done
+no wrong that they should be so punished.  They have not sinned.
+The thing happened, that is all; the husband, father and bread-
+winner, was struck down.  There is no guarding against it.  It is
+fortuitous.  A family stands so many chances of escaping the bottom
+of the Abyss, and so many chances of falling plump down to it.  The
+chance is reducible to cold, pitiless figures, and a few of these
+figures will not be out of place.
+
+Sir A. Forwood calculates that -
+
+
+1 of every 1400 workmen is killed annually.
+1 of every 2500 workmen is totally disabled.
+1 of every 300 workmen is permanently partially disabled.
+1 of every 8 workmen is temporarily disabled 3 or 4 weeks.
+
+
+But these are only the accidents of industry.  The high mortality of
+the people who live in the Ghetto plays a terrible part.  The
+average age at death among the people of the West End is fifty-five
+years; the average age at death among the people of the East End is
+thirty years.  That is to say, the person in the West End has twice
+the chance for life that the person has in the East End.  Talk of
+war!  The mortality in South Africa and the Philippines fades away
+to insignificance.  Here, in the heart of peace, is where the blood
+is being shed; and here not even the civilised rules of warfare
+obtain, for the women and children and babes in the arms are killed
+just as ferociously as the men are killed.  War!  In England, every
+year, 500,000 men, women, and children, engaged in the various
+industries, are killed and disabled, or are injured to disablement
+by disease.
+
+In the West End eighteen per cent. of the children die before five
+years of age; in the East End fifty-five per cent. of the children
+die before five years of age.  And there are streets in London where
+out of every one hundred children born in a year, fifty die during
+the next year; and of the fifty that remain, twenty-five die before
+they are five years old.  Slaughter!  Herod did not do quite so
+badly.
+
+That industry causes greater havoc with human life than battle does
+no better substantiation can be given than the following extract
+from a recent report of the Liverpool Medical Officer, which is not
+applicable to Liverpool alone:-
+
+
+In many instances little if any sunlight could get to the courts,
+and the atmosphere within the dwellings was always foul, owing
+largely to the saturated condition of the walls and ceilings, which
+for so many years had absorbed the exhalations of the occupants into
+their porous material.  Singular testimony to the absence of
+sunlight in these courts was furnished by the action of the Parks
+and Gardens Committee, who desired to brighten the homes of the
+poorest class by gifts of growing flowers and window-boxes; but
+these gifts could not be made in courts such as these, AS FLOWERS
+AND PLANTS WERE SUSCEPTIBLE TO THE UNWHOLESOME SURROUNDINGS, AND
+WOULD NOT LIVE.
+
+Mr. George Haw has compiled the following table on the three St.
+George's parishes (London parishes):-
+
+
+                   Percentage of
+                   Population      Death-rate
+                   Overcrowded      per 1000
+St. George's West  10                 13.2
+St. George's South 35                 23.7
+St. George's East  40                 26.4
+
+
+Then there are the "dangerous trades," in which countless workers
+are employed.  Their hold on life is indeed precarious--far, far
+more precarious than the hold of the twentieth-century soldier on
+life.  In the linen trade, in the preparation of the flax, wet feet
+and wet clothes cause an unusual amount of bronchitis, pneumonia,
+and severe rheumatism; while in the carding and spinning departments
+the fine dust produces lung disease in the majority of cases, and
+the woman who starts carding at seventeen or eighteen begins to
+break up and go to pieces at thirty.  The chemical labourers, picked
+from the strongest and most splendidly-built men to be found, live,
+on an average, less than forty-eight years.
+
+Says Dr. Arlidge, of the potter's trade:  "Potter's dust does not
+kill suddenly, but settles, year after year, a little more firmly
+into the lungs, until at length a case of plaster is formed.
+Breathing becomes more and more difficult and depressed, and finally
+ceases."
+
+Steel dust, stone dust, clay dust, alkali dust, fluff dust, fibre
+dust--all these things kill, and they are more deadly than machine-
+guns and pom-poms.  Worst of all is the lead dust in the white-lead
+trades.  Here is a description of the typical dissolution of a
+young, healthy, well-developed girl who goes to work in a white-lead
+factory:-
+
+
+Here, after a varying degree of exposure, she becomes anaemic.  It
+may be that her gums show a very faint blue line, or perchance her
+teeth and gums are perfectly sound, and no blue line is discernible.
+Coincidently with the anaemia she has been getting thinner, but so
+gradually as scarcely to impress itself upon her or her friends.
+Sickness, however, ensues, and headaches, growing in intensity, are
+developed.  These are frequently attended by obscuration of vision
+or temporary blindness.  Such a girl passes into what appears to her
+friends and medical adviser as ordinary hysteria.  This gradually
+deepens without warning, until she is suddenly seized with a
+convulsion, beginning in one half of the face, then involving the
+arm, next the leg of the same side of the body, until the
+convulsion, violent and purely epileptic form in character, becomes
+universal.  This is attended by loss of consciousness, out of which
+she passes into a series of convulsions, gradually increasing in
+severity, in one of which she dies--or consciousness, partial or
+perfect, is regained, either, it may be, for a few minutes, a few
+hours, or days, during which violent headache is complained of, or
+she is delirious and excited, as in acute mania, or dull and sullen
+as in melancholia, and requires to be roused, when she is found
+wandering, and her speech is somewhat imperfect.  Without further
+warning, save that the pulse, which has become soft, with nearly the
+normal number of beats, all at once becomes low and hard; she is
+suddenly seized with another convulsion, in which she dies, or
+passes into a state of coma from which she never rallies.  In
+another case the convulsions will gradually subside, the headache
+disappears and the patient recovers, only to find that she has
+completely lost her eyesight, a loss that may be temporary or
+permanent.
+
+
+And here are a few specific cases of white-lead poisoning:-
+
+
+Charlotte Rafferty, a fine, well-grown young woman with a splendid
+constitution--who had never had a day's illness in her life--became
+a white-lead worker.  Convulsions seized her at the foot of the
+ladder in the works.  Dr. Oliver examined her, found the blue line
+along her gums, which shows that the system is under the influence
+of the lead.  He knew that the convulsions would shortly return.
+They did so, and she died.
+
+Mary Ann Toler--a girl of seventeen, who had never had a fit in her
+life--three times became ill, and had to leave off work in the
+factory.  Before she was nineteen she showed symptoms of lead
+poisoning--had fits, frothed at the mouth, and died.
+
+Mary A., an unusually vigorous woman, was able to work in the lead
+factory for TWENTY YEARS, having colic once only during that time.
+Her eight children all died in early infancy from convulsions.  One
+morning, whilst brushing her hair, this woman suddenly lost all
+power in both her wrists.
+
+Eliza H., aged twenty-five, AFTER FIVE MONTHS at lead works, was
+seized with colic.  She entered another factory (after being refused
+by the first one) and worked on uninterruptedly for two years.  Then
+the former symptoms returned, she was seized with convulsions, and
+died in two days of acute lead poisoning.
+
+
+Mr. Vaughan Nash, speaking of the unborn generation, says:  "The
+children of the white-lead worker enter the world, as a rule, only
+to die from the convulsions of lead poisoning--they are either born
+prematurely, or die within the first year."
+
+And, finally, let me instance the case of Harriet A. Walker, a young
+girl of seventeen, killed while leading a forlorn hope on the
+industrial battlefield.  She was employed as an enamelled ware
+brusher, wherein lead poisoning is encountered.  Her father and
+brother were both out of employment.  She concealed her illness,
+walked six miles a day to and from work, earned her seven or eight
+shillings per week, and died, at seventeen.
+
+Depression in trade also plays an important part in hurling the
+workers into the Abyss.  With a week's wages between a family and
+pauperism, a month's enforced idleness means hardship and misery
+almost indescribable, and from the ravages of which the victims do
+not always recover when work is to be had again.  Just now the daily
+papers contain the report of a meeting of the Carlisle branch of the
+Dockers' Union, wherein it is stated that many of the men, for
+months past, have not averaged a weekly income of more than from
+four to five shillings.  The stagnated state of the shipping
+industry in the port of London is held accountable for this
+condition of affairs.
+
+To the young working-man or working-woman, or married couple, there
+is no assurance of happy or healthy middle life, nor of solvent old
+age.  Work as they will, they cannot make their future secure.  It
+is all a matter of chance.  Everything depends upon the thing
+happening, the thing with which they have nothing to do.  Precaution
+cannot fend it off, nor can wiles evade it.  If they remain on the
+industrial battlefield they must face it and take their chance
+against heavy odds.  Of course, if they are favourably made and are
+not tied by kinship duties, they may run away from the industrial
+battlefield.  In which event the safest thing the man can do is to
+join the army; and for the woman, possibly, to become a Red Cross
+nurse or go into a nunnery.  In either case they must forego home
+and children and all that makes life worth living and old age other
+than a nightmare.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII--SUICIDE
+
+
+
+With life so precarious, and opportunity for the happiness of life
+so remote, it is inevitable that life shall be cheap and suicide
+common.  So common is it, that one cannot pick up a daily paper
+without running across it; while an attempt-at-suicide case in a
+police court excites no more interest than an ordinary "drunk," and
+is handled with the same rapidity and unconcern.
+
+I remember such a case in the Thames Police Court.  I pride myself
+that I have good eyes and ears, and a fair working knowledge of men
+and things; but I confess, as I stood in that court-room, that I was
+half bewildered by the amazing despatch with which drunks,
+disorderlies, vagrants, brawlers, wife-beaters, thieves, fences,
+gamblers, and women of the street went through the machine of
+justice.  The dock stood in the centre of the court (where the light
+is best), and into it and out again stepped men, women, and
+children, in a stream as steady as the stream of sentences which
+fell from the magistrate's lips.
+
+I was still pondering over a consumptive "fence" who had pleaded
+inability to work and necessity for supporting wife and children,
+and who had received a year at hard labour, when a young boy of
+about twenty appeared in the dock.  "Alfred Freeman," I caught his
+name, but failed to catch the charge.  A stout and motherly-looking
+woman bobbed up in the witness-box and began her testimony.  Wife of
+the Britannia lock-keeper, I learned she was.  Time, night; a
+splash; she ran to the lock and found the prisoner in the water.
+
+I flashed my gaze from her to him.  So that was the charge, self-
+murder.  He stood there dazed and unheeding, his bonny brown hair
+rumpled down his forehead, his face haggard and careworn and boyish
+still.
+
+"Yes, sir," the lock-keeper's wife was saying.  "As fast as I pulled
+to get 'im out, 'e crawled back.  Then I called for 'elp, and some
+workmen 'appened along, and we got 'im out and turned 'im over to
+the constable."
+
+The magistrate complimented the woman on her muscular powers, and
+the court-room laughed; but all I could see was a boy on the
+threshold of life, passionately crawling to muddy death, and there
+was no laughter in it.
+
+A man was now in the witness-box, testifying to the boy's good
+character and giving extenuating evidence.  He was the boy's
+foreman, or had been.  Alfred was a good boy, but he had had lots of
+trouble at home, money matters.  And then his mother was sick.  He
+was given to worrying, and he worried over it till he laid himself
+out and wasn't fit for work.  He (the foreman), for the sake of his
+own reputation, the boy's work being bad, had been forced to ask him
+to resign.
+
+"Anything to say?" the magistrate demanded abruptly.
+
+The boy in the dock mumbled something indistinctly.  He was still
+dazed.
+
+"What does he say, constable?" the magistrate asked impatiently.
+
+The stalwart man in blue bent his ear to the prisoner's lips, and
+then replied loudly, "He says he's very sorry, your Worship."
+
+"Remanded," said his Worship; and the next case was under way, the
+first witness already engaged in taking the oath.  The boy, dazed
+and unheeding, passed out with the jailer.  That was all, five
+minutes from start to finish; and two hulking brutes in the dock
+were trying strenuously to shift the responsibility of the
+possession of a stolen fishing-pole, worth probably ten cents.
+
+The chief trouble with these poor folk is that they do not know how
+to commit suicide, and usually have to make two or three attempts
+before they succeed.  This, very naturally, is a horrid nuisance to
+the constables and magistrates, and gives them no end of trouble.
+Sometimes, however, the magistrates are frankly outspoken about the
+matter, and censure the prisoners for the slackness of their
+attempts.  For instance Mr. R. S-, chairman of the S- B-
+magistrates, in the case the other day of Ann Wood, who tried to
+make away with herself in the canal:  "If you wanted to do it, why
+didn't you do it and get it done with?" demanded the indignant Mr.
+R. S-.  "Why did you not get under the water and make an end of it,
+instead of giving us all this trouble and bother?"
+
+Poverty, misery, and fear of the workhouse, are the principal causes
+of suicide among the working classes.  "I'll drown myself before I
+go into the workhouse," said Ellen Hughes Hunt, aged fifty-two.
+Last Wednesday they held an inquest on her body at Shoreditch.  Her
+husband came from the Islington Workhouse to testify.  He had been a
+cheesemonger, but failure in business and poverty had driven him
+into the workhouse, whither his wife had refused to accompany him.
+
+She was last seen at one in the morning.  Three hours later her hat
+and jacket were found on the towing path by the Regent's Canal, and
+later her body was fished from the water.  VERDICT:  SUICIDE DURING
+TEMPORARY INSANITY.
+
+Such verdicts are crimes against truth.  The Law is a lie, and
+through it men lie most shamelessly.  For instance, a disgraced
+woman, forsaken and spat upon by kith and kin, doses herself and her
+baby with laudanum.  The baby dies; but she pulls through after a
+few weeks in hospital, is charged with murder, convicted, and
+sentenced to ten years' penal servitude.  Recovering, the Law holds
+her responsible for her actions; yet, had she died, the same Law
+would have rendered a verdict of temporary insanity.
+
+Now, considering the case of Ellen Hughes Hunt, it is as fair and
+logical to say that her husband was suffering from temporary
+insanity when he went into the Islington Workhouse, as it is to say
+that she was suffering from temporary insanity when she went into
+the Regent's Canal.  As to which is the preferable sojourning place
+is a matter of opinion, of intellectual judgment.  I, for one, from
+what I know of canals and workhouses, should choose the canal, were
+I in a similar position.  And I make bold to contend that I am no
+more insane than Ellen Hughes Hunt, her husband, and the rest of the
+human herd.
+
+Man no longer follows instinct with the old natural fidelity.  He
+has developed into a reasoning creature, and can intellectually
+cling to life or discard life just as life happens to promise great
+pleasure or pain.  I dare to assert that Ellen Hughes Hunt,
+defrauded and bilked of all the joys of life which fifty-two years'
+service in the world has earned, with nothing but the horrors of the
+workhouse before her, was very rational and level-headed when she
+elected to jump into the canal.  And I dare to assert, further, that
+the jury had done a wiser thing to bring in a verdict charging
+society with temporary insanity for allowing Ellen Hughes Hunt to be
+defrauded and bilked of all the joys of life which fifty-two years'
+service in the world had earned.
+
+Temporary insanity!  Oh, these cursed phrases, these lies of
+language, under which people with meat in their bellies and whole
+shirts on their backs shelter themselves, and evade the
+responsibility of their brothers and sisters, empty of belly and
+without whole shirts on their backs.
+
+From one issue of the Observer, an East End paper, I quote the
+following commonplace events:-
+
+
+A ship's fireman, named Johnny King, was charged with attempting to
+commit suicide.  On Wednesday defendant went to Bow Police Station
+and stated that he had swallowed a quantity of phosphor paste, as he
+was hard up and unable to obtain work.  King was taken inside and an
+emetic administered, when he vomited up a quantity of the poison.
+Defendant now said he was very sorry.  Although he had sixteen
+years' good character, he was unable to obtain work of any kind.
+Mr. Dickinson had defendant put back for the court missionary to see
+him.
+
+Timothy Warner, thirty-two, was remanded for a similar offence.  He
+jumped off Limehouse Pier, and when rescued, said, "I intended to do
+it."
+
+A decent-looking young woman, named Ellen Gray, was remanded on a
+charge of attempting to commit suicide.  About half-past eight on
+Sunday morning Constable 834 K found defendant lying in a doorway in
+Benworth Street, and she was in a very drowsy condition.  She was
+holding an empty bottle in one hand, and stated that some two or
+three hours previously she had swallowed a quantity of laudanum.  As
+she was evidently very ill, the divisional surgeon was sent for, and
+having administered some coffee, ordered that she was to be kept
+awake.  When defendant was charged, she stated that the reason why
+she attempted to take her life was she had neither home nor friends.
+
+
+I do not say that all people who commit suicide are sane, no more
+than I say that all people who do not commit suicide are sane.
+Insecurity of food and shelter, by the way, is a great cause of
+insanity among the living.  Costermongers, hawkers, and pedlars, a
+class of workers who live from hand to mouth more than those of any
+other class, form the highest percentage of those in the lunatic
+asylums.  Among the males each year, 26.9 per 10,000 go insane, and
+among the women, 36.9.  On the other hand, of soldiers, who are at
+least sure of food and shelter, 13 per 10,000 go insane; and of
+farmers and graziers, only 5.1.  So a coster is twice as likely to
+lose his reason as a soldier, and five times as likely as a farmer.
+
+Misfortune and misery are very potent in turning people's heads, and
+drive one person to the lunatic asylum, and another to the morgue or
+the gallows.  When the thing happens, and the father and husband,
+for all of his love for wife and children and his willingness to
+work, can get no work to do, it is a simple matter for his reason to
+totter and the light within his brain go out.  And it is especially
+simple when it is taken into consideration that his body is ravaged
+by innutrition and disease, in addition to his soul being torn by
+the sight of his suffering wife and little ones.
+
+"He is a good-looking man, with a mass of black hair, dark,
+expressive eyes, delicately chiselled nose and chin, and wavy, fair
+moustache."  This is the reporter's description of Frank Cavilla as
+he stood in court, this dreary month of September, "dressed in a
+much worn grey suit, and wearing no collar."
+
+Frank Cavilla lived and worked as a house decorator in London.  He
+is described as a good workman, a steady fellow, and not given to
+drink, while all his neighbours unite in testifying that he was a
+gentle and affectionate husband and father.
+
+His wife, Hannah Cavilla, was a big, handsome, light-hearted woman.
+She saw to it that his children were sent neat and clean (the
+neighbours all remarked the fact) to the Childeric Road Board
+School.  And so, with such a man, so blessed, working steadily and
+living temperately, all went well, and the goose hung high.
+
+Then the thing happened.  He worked for a Mr. Beck, builder, and
+lived in one of his master's houses in Trundley Road.  Mr. Beck was
+thrown from his trap and killed.  The thing was an unruly horse,
+and, as I say, it happened.  Cavilla had to seek fresh employment
+and find another house.
+
+This occurred eighteen months ago.  For eighteen months he fought
+the big fight.  He got rooms in a little house in Batavia Road, but
+could not make both ends meet.  Steady work could not be obtained.
+He struggled manfully at casual employment of all sorts, his wife
+and four children starving before his eyes.  He starved himself, and
+grew weak, and fell ill.  This was three months ago, and then there
+was absolutely no food at all.  They made no complaint, spoke no
+word; but poor folk know.  The housewives of Batavia Road sent them
+food, but so respectable were the Cavillas that the food was sent
+anonymously, mysteriously, so as not to hurt their pride.
+
+The thing had happened.  He had fought, and starved, and suffered
+for eighteen months.  He got up one September morning, early.  He
+opened his pocket-knife.  He cut the throat of his wife, Hannah
+Cavilla, aged thirty-three.  He cut the throat of his first-born,
+Frank, aged twelve.  He cut the throat of his son, Walter, aged
+eight.  He cut the throat of his daughter, Nellie, aged four.  He
+cut the throat of his youngest-born, Ernest, aged sixteen months.
+Then he watched beside the dead all day until the evening, when the
+police came, and he told them to put a penny in the slot of the gas-
+meter in order that they might have light to see.
+
+Frank Cavilla stood in court, dressed in a much worn grey suit, and
+wearing no collar.  He was a good-looking man, with a mass of black
+hair, dark, expressive eyes, delicately chiselled nose and chin, and
+wavy, fair moustache.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII--THE CHILDREN
+
+
+
+"Where home is a hovel, and dull we grovel,
+Forgetting the world is fair."
+
+
+There is one beautiful sight in the East End, and only one, and it
+is the children dancing in the street when the organ-grinder goes
+his round.  It is fascinating to watch them, the new-born, the next
+generation, swaying and stepping, with pretty little mimicries and
+graceful inventions all their own, with muscles that move swiftly
+and easily, and bodies that leap airily, weaving rhythms never
+taught in dancing school.
+
+I have talked with these children, here, there, and everywhere, and
+they struck me as being bright as other children, and in many ways
+even brighter.  They have most active little imaginations.  Their
+capacity for projecting themselves into the realm of romance and
+fantasy is remarkable.  A joyous life is romping in their blood.
+They delight in music, and motion, and colour, and very often they
+betray a startling beauty of face and form under their filth and
+rags.
+
+But there is a Pied Piper of London Town who steals them all away.
+They disappear.  One never sees them again, or anything that
+suggests them.  You may look for them in vain amongst the generation
+of grown-ups.  Here you will find stunted forms, ugly faces, and
+blunt and stolid minds.  Grace, beauty, imagination, all the
+resiliency of mind and muscle, are gone.  Sometimes, however, you
+may see a woman, not necessarily old, but twisted and deformed out
+of all womanhood, bloated and drunken, lift her draggled skirts and
+execute a few grotesque and lumbering steps upon the pavement.  It
+is a hint that she was once one of those children who danced to the
+organ-grinder.  Those grotesque and lumbering steps are all that is
+left of the promise of childhood.  In the befogged recesses of her
+brain has arisen a fleeting memory that she was once a girl.  The
+crowd closes in.  Little girls are dancing beside her, about her,
+with all the pretty graces she dimly recollects, but can no more
+than parody with her body.  Then she pants for breath, exhausted,
+and stumbles out through the circle.  But the little girls dance on.
+
+The children of the Ghetto possess all the qualities which make for
+noble manhood and womanhood; but the Ghetto itself, like an
+infuriated tigress turning on its young, turns upon and destroys all
+these qualities, blots out the light and laughter, and moulds those
+it does not kill into sodden and forlorn creatures, uncouth,
+degraded, and wretched below the beasts of the field.
+
+As to the manner in which this is done, I have in previous chapters
+described it at length; here let Professor Huxley describe it in
+brief:-
+
+"Any one who is acquainted with the state of the population of all
+great industrial centres, whether in this or other countries, is
+aware that amidst a large and increasing body of that population
+there reigns supreme . . . that condition which the French call la
+misere, a word for which I do not think there is any exact English
+equivalent.  It is a condition in which the food, warmth, and
+clothing which are necessary for the mere maintenance of the
+functions of the body in their normal state cannot be obtained; in
+which men, women, and children are forced to crowd into dens wherein
+decency is abolished, and the most ordinary conditions of healthful
+existence are impossible of attainment; in which the pleasures
+within reach are reduced to brutality and drunkenness; in which the
+pains accumulate at compound interest in the shape of starvation,
+disease, stunted development, and moral degradation; in which the
+prospect of even steady and honest industry is a life of
+unsuccessful battling with hunger, rounded by a pauper's grave."
+
+In such conditions, the outlook for children is hopeless.  They die
+like flies, and those that survive, survive because they possess
+excessive vitality and a capacity of adaptation to the degradation
+with which they are surrounded.  They have no home life.  In the
+dens and lairs in which they live they are exposed to all that is
+obscene and indecent.  And as their minds are made rotten, so are
+their bodies made rotten by bad sanitation, overcrowding, and
+underfeeding.  When a father and mother live with three or four
+children in a room where the children take turn about in sitting up
+to drive the rats away from the sleepers, when those children never
+have enough to eat and are preyed upon and made miserable and weak
+by swarming vermin, the sort of men and women the survivors will
+make can readily be imagined.
+
+
+"Dull despair and misery
+Lie about them from their birth;
+Ugly curses, uglier mirth,
+Are their earliest lullaby."
+
+
+A man and a woman marry and set up housekeeping in one room.  Their
+income does not increase with the years, though their family does,
+and the man is exceedingly lucky if he can keep his health and his
+job.  A baby comes, and then another.  This means that more room
+should be obtained; but these little mouths and bodies mean
+additional expense and make it absolutely impossible to get more
+spacious quarters.  More babies come.  There is not room in which to
+turn around.  The youngsters run the streets, and by the time they
+are twelve or fourteen the room-issue comes to a head, and out they
+go on the streets for good.  The boy, if he be lucky, can manage to
+make the common lodging-houses, and he may have any one of several
+ends.  But the girl of fourteen or fifteen, forced in this manner to
+leave the one room called home, and able to earn at the best a
+paltry five or six shillings per week, can have but one end.  And
+the bitter end of that one end is such as that of the woman whose
+body the police found this morning in a doorway in Dorset Street,
+Whitechapel.  Homeless, shelterless, sick, with no one with her in
+her last hour, she had died in the night of exposure.  She was
+sixty-two years old and a match vendor.  She died as a wild animal
+dies.
+
+Fresh in my mind is the picture of a boy in the dock of an East End
+police court.  His head was barely visible above the railing.  He
+was being proved guilty of stealing two shillings from a woman,
+which he had spent, not for candy and cakes and a good time, but for
+food.
+
+"Why didn't you ask the woman for food?" the magistrate demanded, in
+a hurt sort of tone.  "She would surely have given you something to
+eat."
+
+"If I 'ad arsked 'er, I'd got locked up for beggin'," was the boy's
+reply.
+
+The magistrate knitted his brows and accepted the rebuke.  Nobody
+knew the boy, nor his father or mother.  He was without beginning or
+antecedent, a waif, a stray, a young cub seeking his food in the
+jungle of empire, preying upon the weak and being preyed upon by the
+strong.
+
+The people who try to help, who gather up the Ghetto children and
+send them away on a day's outing to the country, believe that not
+very many children reach the age of ten without having had at least
+one day there.  Of this, a writer says:  "The mental change caused
+by one day so spent must not be undervalued.  Whatever the
+circumstances, the children learn the meaning of fields and woods,
+so that descriptions of country scenery in the books they read,
+which before conveyed no impression, become now intelligible."
+
+One day in the fields and woods, if they are lucky enough to be
+picked up by the people who try to help!  And they are being born
+faster every day than they can be carted off to the fields and woods
+for the one day in their lives.  One day!  In all their lives, one
+day!  And for the rest of the days, as the boy told a certain
+bishop, "At ten we 'ops the wag; at thirteen we nicks things; an' at
+sixteen we bashes the copper."  Which is to say, at ten they play
+truant, at thirteen steal, and at sixteen are sufficiently developed
+hooligans to smash the policemen.
+
+The Rev. J. Cartmel Robinson tells of a boy and girl of his parish
+who set out to walk to the forest.  They walked and walked through
+the never-ending streets, expecting always to see it by-and-by;
+until they sat down at last, faint and despairing, and were rescued
+by a kind woman who brought them back.  Evidently they had been
+overlooked by the people who try to help.
+
+The same gentleman is authority for the statement that in a street
+in Hoxton (a district of the vast East End), over seven hundred
+children, between five and thirteen years, live in eighty small
+houses.  And he adds:  "It is because London has largely shut her
+children in a maze of streets and houses and robbed them of their
+rightful inheritance in sky and field and brook, that they grow up
+to be men and women physically unfit."
+
+He tells of a member of his congregation who let a basement room to
+a married couple.  "They said they had two children; when they got
+possession it turned out that they had four.  After a while a fifth
+appeared, and the landlord gave them notice to quit.  They paid no
+attention to it.  Then the sanitary inspector who has to wink at the
+law so often, came in and threatened my friend with legal
+proceedings.  He pleaded that he could not get them out.  They
+pleaded that nobody would have them with so many children at a
+rental within their means, which is one of the commonest complaints
+of the poor, by-the-bye.  What was to be done?  The landlord was
+between two millstones.  Finally he applied to the magistrate, who
+sent up an officer to inquire into the case.  Since that time about
+twenty days have elapsed, and nothing has yet been done.  Is this a
+singular case?  By no means; it is quite common."
+
+Last week the police raided a disorderly house.  In one room were
+found two young children.  They were arrested and charged with being
+inmates the same as the women had been.  Their father appeared at
+the trial.  He stated that himself and wife and two older children,
+besides the two in the dock, occupied that room; he stated also that
+he occupied it because he could get no other room for the half-crown
+a week he paid for it.  The magistrate discharged the two juvenile
+offenders and warned the father that he was bringing his children up
+unhealthily.
+
+But there is no need further to multiply instances.  In London the
+slaughter of the innocents goes on on a scale more stupendous than
+any before in the history of the world.  And equally stupendous is
+the callousness of the people who believe in Christ, acknowledge
+God, and go to church regularly on Sunday.  For the rest of the week
+they riot about on the rents and profits which come to them from the
+East End stained with the blood of the children.  Also, at times, so
+peculiarly are they made, they will take half a million of these
+rents and profits and send it away to educate the black boys of the
+Soudan.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV--A VISION OF THE NIGHT
+
+
+
+All these were years ago little red-coloured, pulpy infants, capable
+of being kneaded, baked, into any social form you chose.--CARLYLE.
+
+
+Late last night I walked along Commercial Street from Spitalfields
+to Whitechapel, and still continuing south, down Leman Street to the
+docks.  And as I walked I smiled at the East End papers, which,
+filled with civic pride, boastfully proclaim that there is nothing
+the matter with the East End as a living place for men and women.
+
+It is rather hard to tell a tithe of what I saw.  Much of it is
+untenable.  But in a general way I may say that I saw a nightmare, a
+fearful slime that quickened the pavement with life, a mess of
+unmentionable obscenity that put into eclipse the "nightly horror"
+of Piccadilly and the Strand.  It WAS a menagerie of garmented
+bipeds that looked something like humans and more like beasts, and
+to complete the picture, brass-buttoned keepers kept order among
+them when they snarled too fiercely.
+
+I was glad the keepers were there, for I did not have on my
+"seafaring" clothes, and I was what is called a "mark" for the
+creatures of prey that prowled up and down.  At times, between
+keepers, these males looked at me sharply, hungrily, gutter-wolves
+that they were, and I was afraid of their hands, of their naked
+hands, as one may be afraid of the paws of a gorilla.  They reminded
+me of gorillas.  Their bodies were small, ill-shaped, and squat.
+There were no swelling muscles, no abundant thews and wide-spreading
+shoulders.  They exhibited, rather, an elemental economy of nature,
+such as the cave-men must have exhibited.  But there was strength in
+those meagre bodies, the ferocious, primordial strength to clutch
+and gripe and tear and rend.  When they spring upon their human prey
+they are known even to bend the victim backward and double its body
+till the back is broken.  They possess neither conscience nor
+sentiment, and they will kill for a half-sovereign, without fear or
+favour, if they are given but half a chance.  They are a new
+species, a breed of city savages.  The streets and houses, alleys
+and courts, are their hunting grounds.  As valley and mountain are
+to the natural savage, street and building are valley and mountain
+to them.  The slum is their jungle, and they live and prey in the
+jungle.
+
+The dear soft people of the golden theatres and wonder-mansions of
+the West End do not see these creatures, do not dream that they
+exist.  But they are here, alive, very much alive in their jungle.
+And woe the day, when England is fighting in her last trench, and
+her able-bodied men are on the firing line!  For on that day they
+will crawl out of their dens and lairs, and the people of the West
+End will see them, as the dear soft aristocrats of Feudal France saw
+them and asked one another, "Whence came they?"  "Are they men?"
+
+But they were not the only beasts that ranged the menagerie.  They
+were only here and there, lurking in dark courts and passing like
+grey shadows along the walls; but the women from whose rotten loins
+they spring were everywhere.  They whined insolently, and in maudlin
+tones begged me for pennies, and worse.  They held carouse in every
+boozing ken, slatternly, unkempt, bleary-eyed, and towsled, leering
+and gibbering, overspilling with foulness and corruption, and, gone
+in debauch, sprawling across benches and bars, unspeakably
+repulsive, fearful to look upon.
+
+And there were others, strange, weird faces and forms and twisted
+monstrosities that shouldered me on every side, inconceivable types
+of sodden ugliness, the wrecks of society, the perambulating
+carcasses, the living deaths--women, blasted by disease and drink
+till their shame brought not tuppence in the open mart; and men, in
+fantastic rags, wrenched by hardship and exposure out of all
+semblance of men, their faces in a perpetual writhe of pain,
+grinning idiotically, shambling like apes, dying with every step
+they took and each breath they drew.  And there were young girls, of
+eighteen and twenty, with trim bodies and faces yet untouched with
+twist and bloat, who had fetched the bottom of the Abyss plump, in
+one swift fall.  And I remember a lad of fourteen, and one of six or
+seven, white-faced and sickly, homeless, the pair of them, who sat
+upon the pavement with their backs against a railing and watched it
+all.
+
+The unfit and the unneeded!  Industry does not clamour for them.
+There are no jobs going begging through lack of men and women.  The
+dockers crowd at the entrance gate, and curse and turn away when the
+foreman does not give them a call.  The engineers who have work pay
+six shillings a week to their brother engineers who can find nothing
+to do; 514,000 textile workers oppose a resolution condemning the
+employment of children under fifteen.  Women, and plenty to spare,
+are found to toil under the sweat-shop masters for tenpence a day of
+fourteen hours.  Alfred Freeman crawls to muddy death because he
+loses his job.  Ellen Hughes Hunt prefers Regent's Canal to
+Islington Workhouse.  Frank Cavilla cuts the throats of his wife and
+children because he cannot find work enough to give them food and
+shelter.
+
+The unfit and the unneeded!  The miserable and despised and
+forgotten, dying in the social shambles.  The progeny of
+prostitution--of the prostitution of men and women and children, of
+flesh and blood, and sparkle and spirit; in brief, the prostitution
+of labour.  If this is the best that civilisation can do for the
+human, then give us howling and naked savagery.  Far better to be a
+people of the wilderness and desert, of the cave and the squatting-
+place, than to be a people of the machine and the Abyss.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV--THE HUNGER WAIL
+
+
+
+"My father has more stamina than I, for he is country-born."
+
+The speaker, a bright young East Ender, was lamenting his poor
+physical development.
+
+"Look at my scrawny arm, will you."  He pulled up his sleeve.  "Not
+enough to eat, that's what's the matter with it.  Oh, not now.  I
+have what I want to eat these days.  But it's too late.  It can't
+make up for what I didn't have to eat when I was a kiddy.  Dad came
+up to London from the Fen Country.  Mother died, and there were six
+of us kiddies and dad living in two small rooms.
+
+"He had hard times, dad did.  He might have chucked us, but he
+didn't.  He slaved all day, and at night he came home and cooked and
+cared for us.  He was father and mother, both.  He did his best, but
+we didn't have enough to eat.  We rarely saw meat, and then of the
+worst.  And it is not good for growing kiddies to sit down to a
+dinner of bread and a bit of cheese, and not enough of it.
+
+"And what's the result?  I am undersized, and I haven't the stamina
+of my dad.  It was starved out of me.  In a couple of generations
+there'll be no more of me here in London.  Yet there's my younger
+brother; he's bigger and better developed.  You see, dad and we
+children held together, and that accounts for it."
+
+"But I don't see," I objected.  "I should think, under such
+conditions, that the vitality should decrease and the younger
+children be born weaker and weaker."
+
+"Not when they hold together," he replied.  "Whenever you come along
+in the East End and see a child of from eight to twelve, good-sized,
+well-developed, and healthy-looking, just you ask and you will find
+that it is the youngest in the family, or at least is one of the
+younger.  The way of it is this:  the older children starve more
+than the younger ones.  By the time the younger ones come along, the
+older ones are starting to work, and there is more money coming in,
+and more food to go around."
+
+He pulled down his sleeve, a concrete instance of where chronic
+semi-starvation kills not, but stunts.  His voice was but one among
+the myriads that raise the cry of the hunger wail in the greatest
+empire in the world.  On any one day, over 1,000,000 people are in
+receipt of poor-law relief in the United Kingdom.  One in eleven of
+the whole working-class receive poor-law relief in the course of the
+year; 37,500,000 people receive less than 12 pounds per month, per
+family; and a constant army of 8,000,000 lives on the border of
+starvation.
+
+A committee of the London County school board makes this
+declaration:  "At times, WHEN THERE IS NO SPECIAL DISTRESS, 55,000
+children in a state of hunger, which makes it useless to attempt to
+teach them, are in the schools of London alone."  The italics are
+mine.  "When there is no special distress" means good times in
+England; for the people of England have come to look upon starvation
+and suffering, which they call "distress," as part of the social
+order.  Chronic starvation is looked upon as a matter of course.  It
+is only when acute starvation makes its appearance on a large scale
+that they think something is unusual
+
+I shall never forget the bitter wail of a blind man in a little East
+End shop at the close of a murky day.  He had been the eldest of
+five children, with a mother and no father.  Being the eldest, he
+had starved and worked as a child to put bread into the mouths of
+his little brothers and sisters.  Not once in three months did he
+ever taste meat.  He never knew what it was to have his hunger
+thoroughly appeased.  And he claimed that this chronic starvation of
+his childhood had robbed him of his sight.  To support the claim, he
+quoted from the report of the Royal Commission on the Blind,
+"Blindness is more prevalent in poor districts, and poverty
+accelerates this dreadful affliction."
+
+But he went further, this blind man, and in his voice was the
+bitterness of an afflicted man to whom society did not give enough
+to eat.  He was one of an enormous army of blind in London, and he
+said that in the blind homes they did not receive half enough to
+eat.  He gave the diet for a day:-
+
+
+Breakfast--0.75 pint of skilly and dry bread.
+Dinner   --3 oz. meat.
+            1 slice of bread.
+            0.5 lb. potatoes.
+Supper   --0.75 pint of skilly and dry bread.
+
+
+Oscar Wilde, God rest his soul, voices the cry of the prison child,
+which, in varying degree, is the cry of the prison man and woman:-
+
+"The second thing from which a child suffers in prison is hunger.
+The food that is given to it consists of a piece of usually bad-
+baked prison bread and a tin of water for breakfast at half-past
+seven.  At twelve o'clock it gets dinner, composed of a tin of
+coarse Indian meal stirabout (skilly), and at half-past five it gets
+a piece of dry bread and a tin of water for its supper.  This diet
+in the case of a strong grown man is always productive of illness of
+some kind, chiefly of course diarrhoea, with its attendant weakness.
+In fact, in a big prison astringent medicines are served out
+regularly by the warders as a matter of course.  In the case of a
+child, the child is, as a rule, incapable of eating the food at all.
+Any one who knows anything about children knows how easily a child's
+digestion is upset by a fit of crying, or trouble and mental
+distress of any kind.  A child who has been crying all day long, and
+perhaps half the night, in a lonely dim-lit cell, and is preyed upon
+by terror, simply cannot eat food of this coarse, horrible kind.  In
+the case of the little child to whom Warder Martin gave the
+biscuits, the child was crying with hunger on Tuesday morning, and
+utterly unable to eat the bread and water served to it for its
+breakfast.  Martin went out after the breakfasts had been served and
+bought the few sweet biscuits for the child rather than see it
+starving.  It was a beautiful action on his part, and was so
+recognised by the child, who, utterly unconscious of the regulations
+of the Prison Board, told one of the senior wardens how kind this
+junior warden had been to him.  The result was, of course, a report
+and a dismissal."
+
+Robert Blatchford compares the workhouse pauper's daily diet with
+the soldier's, which, when he was a soldier, was not considered
+liberal enough, and yet is twice as liberal as the pauper's.
+
+
+PAUPER    DIET          SOLDIER
+3.25 oz.  Meat          12 oz.
+15.5 oz.  Bread         24 oz.
+6 oz.     Vegetables     8 oz.
+
+
+The adult male pauper gets meat (outside of soup) but once a week,
+and the paupers "have nearly all that pallid, pasty complexion which
+is the sure mark of starvation."
+
+Here is a table, comparing the workhouse officer's weekly
+allowance:-
+
+
+OFFICER    DIET          PAUPER
+7 lb.      Bread         6.75 lb.
+5 lb.      Meat          1 lb. 2 oz.
+12 oz.     Bacon         2.5 oz.
+8 oz.      Cheese        2 oz.
+7 lb.      Potatoes      1.5 lb.
+6 lb.      Vegetables    none.
+1 lb.      Flour         none.
+2 oz.      Lard          none.
+12 oz.     Butter        7 oz.
+none.      Rice Pudding  1 lb.
+
+
+And as the same writer remarks:  "The officer's diet is still more
+liberal than the pauper's; but evidently it is not considered
+liberal enough, for a footnote is added to the officer's table
+saying that 'a cash payment of two shillings and sixpence a week is
+also made to each resident officer and servant.'  If the pauper has
+ample food, why does the officer have more?  And if the officer has
+not too much, can the pauper be properly fed on less than half the
+amount?"
+
+But it is not alone the Ghetto-dweller, the prisoner, and the pauper
+that starve.  Hodge, of the country, does not know what it is always
+to have a full belly.  In truth, it is his empty belly which has
+driven him to the city in such great numbers.  Let us investigate
+the way of living of a labourer from a parish in the Bradfield Poor
+Law Union, Berks.  Supposing him to have two children, steady work,
+a rent-free cottage, and an average weekly wage of thirteen
+shillings, which is equivalent to $3.25, then here is his weekly
+budget:-
+
+                                      s.  d.
+Bread (5 quarterns)                   1   10
+Flour (0.5 gallon)                    0   4
+Tea (0.25 lb.)                        0   6
+Butter (1 lb.)                        1   3
+Lard (1 lb.)                          0   6
+Sugar (6 lb.)                         1   0
+Bacon or other meat (about 0.25 lb.)  2   8
+Cheese (1 lb.)                        0   8
+Milk (half-tin condensed)             0   3.25
+Coal                                  1   6
+Beer                                  none
+Tobacco                               none
+Insurance ("Prudential")              0   3
+Labourers' Union                      0   1
+Wood, tools, dispensary, &c.          0   6
+Insurance ("Foresters") and margin    1   1.75
+        for clothes
+Total                                13   0
+
+
+The guardians of the workhouse in the above Union pride themselves
+on their rigid economy.  It costs per pauper per week:-
+
+               s.   d.
+Men            6    1.5
+Women          5    6.5
+Children       5    1.25
+
+
+If the labourer whose budget has been described should quit his toil
+and go into the workhouse, he would cost the guardians for
+
+               s.   d.
+Himself        6    1.5
+Wife           5    6.5
+Two children  10    2.5
+Total         21    10.5
+Or roughly, $5.46
+
+
+It would require more than a guinea for the workhouse to care for
+him and his family, which he, somehow, manages to do on thirteen
+shillings.  And in addition, it is an understood fact that it is
+cheaper to cater for a large number of people--buying, cooking, and
+serving wholesale--than it is to cater for a small number of people,
+say a family.
+
+Nevertheless, at the time this budget was compiled, there was in
+that parish another family, not of four, but eleven persons, who had
+to live on an income, not of thirteen shillings, but of twelve
+shillings per week (eleven shillings in winter), and which had, not
+a rent-free cottage, but a cottage for which it paid three shillings
+per week.
+
+This must be understood, and understood clearly:  WHATEVER IS TRUE
+OF LONDON IN THE WAY OF POVERTY AND DEGRADATION, IS TRUE OF ALL
+ENGLAND.  While Paris is not by any means France, the city of London
+is England.  The frightful conditions which mark London an inferno
+likewise mark the United Kingdom an inferno.  The argument that the
+decentralisation of London would ameliorate conditions is a vain
+thing and false.  If the 6,000,000 people of London were separated
+into one hundred cities each with a population of 60,000, misery
+would be decentralised but not diminished.  The sum of it would
+remain as large.
+
+In this instance, Mr. B. S. Rowntree, by an exhaustive analysis, has
+proved for the country town what Mr. Charles Booth has proved for
+the metropolis, that fully one-fourth of the dwellers are condemned
+to a poverty which destroys them physically and spiritually; that
+fully one-fourth of the dwellers do not have enough to eat, are
+inadequately clothed, sheltered, and warmed in a rigorous climate,
+and are doomed to a moral degeneracy which puts them lower than the
+savage in cleanliness and decency.
+
+After listening to the wail of an old Irish peasant in Kerry, Robert
+Blatchford asked him what he wanted.  "The old man leaned upon his
+spade and looked out across the black peat fields at the lowering
+skies.  'What is it that I'm wantun?' he said; then in a deep
+plaintive tone he continued, more to himself than to me, 'All our
+brave bhoys and dear gurrls is away an' over the says, an' the agent
+has taken the pig off me, an' the wet has spiled the praties, an'
+I'm an owld man, AN' I WANT THE DAY AV JUDGMENT.'"
+
+The Day of Judgment!  More than he want it.  From all the land rises
+the hunger wail, from Ghetto and countryside, from prison and casual
+ward, from asylum and workhouse--the cry of the people who have not
+enough to eat.  Millions of people, men, women, children, little
+babes, the blind, the deaf, the halt, the sick, vagabonds and
+toilers, prisoners and paupers, the people of Ireland, England,
+Scotland, Wales, who have not enough to eat.  And this, in face of
+the fact that five men can produce bread for a thousand; that one
+workman can produce cotton cloth for 250 people, woollens for 300,
+and boots and shoes for 1000.  It would seem that 40,000,000 people
+are keeping a big house, and that they are keeping it badly.  The
+income is all right, but there is something criminally wrong with
+the management.  And who dares to say that it is not criminally
+mismanaged, this big house, when five men can produce bread for a
+thousand, and yet millions have not enough to eat?
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVI--DRINK, TEMPERANCE, AND THRIFT
+
+
+
+The English working classes may be said to be soaked in beer.  They
+are made dull and sodden by it.  Their efficiency is sadly impaired,
+and they lose whatever imagination, invention, and quickness may be
+theirs by right of race.  It may hardly be called an acquired habit,
+for they are accustomed to it from their earliest infancy.  Children
+are begotten in drunkenness, saturated in drink before they draw
+their first breath, born to the smell and taste of it, and brought
+up in the midst of it.
+
+The public-house is ubiquitous.  It flourishes on every corner and
+between corners, and it is frequented almost as much by women as by
+men.  Children are to be found in it as well, waiting till their
+fathers and mothers are ready to go home, sipping from the glasses
+of their elders, listening to the coarse language and degrading
+conversation, catching the contagion of it, familiarising themselves
+with licentiousness and debauchery.
+
+Mrs. Grundy rules as supremely over the workers as she does over the
+bourgeoisie; but in the case of the workers, the one thing she does
+not frown upon is the public-house.  No disgrace or shame attaches
+to it, nor to the young woman or girl who makes a practice of
+entering it.
+
+I remember a girl in a coffee-house saying, "I never drink spirits
+when in a public-'ouse."  She was a young and pretty waitress, and
+she was laying down to another waitress her pre-eminent
+respectability and discretion.  Mrs. Grundy drew the line at
+spirits, but allowed that it was quite proper for a clean young girl
+to drink beer, and to go into a public-house to drink it.
+
+Not only is this beer unfit for the people to drink, but too often
+the men and women are unfit to drink it.  On the other hand, it is
+their very unfitness that drives them to drink it.  Ill-fed,
+suffering from innutrition and the evil effects of overcrowding and
+squalor, their constitutions develop a morbid craving for the drink,
+just as the sickly stomach of the overstrung Manchester factory
+operative hankers after excessive quantities of pickles and similar
+weird foods.  Unhealthy working and living engenders unhealthy
+appetites and desires.  Man cannot be worked worse than a horse is
+worked, and be housed and fed as a pig is housed and fed, and at the
+same time have clean and wholesome ideals and aspirations.
+
+As home-life vanishes, the public-house appears.  Not only do men
+and women abnormally crave drink, who are overworked, exhausted,
+suffering from deranged stomachs and bad sanitation, and deadened by
+the ugliness and monotony of existence, but the gregarious men and
+women who have no home-life flee to the bright and clattering
+public-house in a vain attempt to express their gregariousness.  And
+when a family is housed in one small room, home-life is impossible.
+
+A brief examination of such a dwelling will serve to bring to light
+one important cause of drunkenness.  Here the family arises in the
+morning, dresses, and makes its toilet, father, mother, sons, and
+daughters, and in the same room, shoulder to shoulder (for the room
+is small), the wife and mother cooks the breakfast.  And in the same
+room, heavy and sickening with the exhalations of their packed
+bodies throughout the night, that breakfast is eaten.  The father
+goes to work, the elder children go to school or into the street,
+and the mother remains with her crawling, toddling youngsters to do
+her housework--still in the same room.  Here she washes the clothes,
+filling the pent space with soapsuds and the smell of dirty clothes,
+and overhead she hangs the wet linen to dry.
+
+Here, in the evening, amid the manifold smells of the day, the
+family goes to its virtuous couch.  That is to say, as many as
+possible pile into the one bed (if bed they have), and the surplus
+turns in on the floor.  And this is the round of their existence,
+month after month, year after year, for they never get a vacation
+save when they are evicted.  When a child dies, and some are always
+bound to die, since fifty-five per cent. of the East End children
+die before they are five years old, the body is laid out in the same
+room.  And if they are very poor, it is kept for some time until
+they can bury it.  During the day it lies on the bed; during the
+night, when the living take the bed, the dead occupies the table,
+from which, in the morning, when the dead is put back into the bed,
+they eat their breakfast.  Sometimes the body is placed on the shelf
+which serves as a pantry for their food.  Only a couple of weeks
+ago, an East End woman was in trouble, because, in this fashion,
+being unable to bury it, she had kept her dead child three weeks.
+
+Now such a room as I have described is not home but horror; and the
+men and women who flee away from it to the public-house are to be
+pitied, not blamed.  There are 300,000 people, in London, divided
+into families that live in single rooms, while there are 900,000 who
+are illegally housed according to the Public Health Act of 1891--a
+respectable recruiting-ground for the drink traffic.
+
+Then there are the insecurity of happiness, the precariousness of
+existence, the well-founded fear of the future--potent factors in
+driving people to drink.  Wretchedness squirms for alleviation, and
+in the public-house its pain is eased and forgetfulness is obtained.
+It is unhealthy.  Certainly it is, but everything else about their
+lives is unhealthy, while this brings the oblivion that nothing else
+in their lives can bring.  It even exalts them, and makes them feel
+that they are finer and better, though at the same time it drags
+them down and makes them more beastly than ever.  For the
+unfortunate man or woman, it is a race between miseries that ends
+with death.
+
+It is of no avail to preach temperance and teetotalism to these
+people.  The drink habit may be the cause of many miseries; but it
+is, in turn, the effect of other and prior miseries.  The temperance
+advocates may preach their hearts out over the evils of drink, but
+until the evils that cause people to drink are abolished, drink and
+its evils will remain.
+
+Until the people who try to help realise this, their well-
+intentioned efforts will be futile, and they will present a
+spectacle fit only to set Olympus laughing.  I have gone through an
+exhibition of Japanese art, got up for the poor of Whitechapel with
+the idea of elevating them, of begetting in them yearnings for the
+Beautiful and True and Good.  Granting (what is not so) that the
+poor folk are thus taught to know and yearn after the Beautiful and
+True and Good, the foul facts of their existence and the social law
+that dooms one in three to a public-charity death, demonstrate that
+this knowledge and yearning will be only so much of an added curse
+to them.  They will have so much more to forget than if they had
+never known and yearned.  Did Destiny to-day bind me down to the
+life of an East End slave for the rest of my years, and did Destiny
+grant me but one wish, I should ask that I might forget all about
+the Beautiful and True and Good; that I might forget all I had
+learned from the open books, and forget the people I had known, the
+things I had heard, and the lands I had seen.  And if Destiny didn't
+grant it, I am pretty confident that I should get drunk and forget
+it as often as possible.
+
+These people who try to help!  Their college settlements, missions,
+charities, and what not, are failures.  In the nature of things they
+cannot but be failures.  They are wrongly, though sincerely,
+conceived.  They approach life through a misunderstanding of life,
+these good folk.  They do not understand the West End, yet they come
+down to the East End as teachers and savants.  They do not
+understand the simple sociology of Christ, yet they come to the
+miserable and the despised with the pomp of social redeemers.  They
+have worked faithfully, but beyond relieving an infinitesimal
+fraction of misery and collecting a certain amount of data which
+might otherwise have been more scientifically and less expensively
+collected, they have achieved nothing.
+
+As some one has said, they do everything for the poor except get off
+their backs.  The very money they dribble out in their child's
+schemes has been wrung from the poor.  They come from a race of
+successful and predatory bipeds who stand between the worker and his
+wages, and they try to tell the worker what he shall do with the
+pitiful balance left to him.  Of what use, in the name of God, is it
+to establish nurseries for women workers, in which, for instance, a
+child is taken while the mother makes violets in Islington at three
+farthings a gross, when more children and violet-makers than they
+can cope with are being born right along?  This violet-maker handles
+each flower four times, 576 handlings for three farthings, and in
+the day she handles the flowers 6912 times for a wage of ninepence.
+She is being robbed.  Somebody is on her back, and a yearning for
+the Beautiful and True and Good will not lighten her burden.  They
+do nothing for her, these dabblers; and what they do not do for the
+mother, undoes at night, when the child comes home, all that they
+have done for the child in the day.
+
+And one and all, they join in teaching a fundamental lie.  They do
+not know it is a lie, but their ignorance does not make it more of a
+truth.  And the lie they preach is "thrift."  An instant will
+demonstrate it.  In overcrowded London, the struggle for a chance to
+work is keen, and because of this struggle wages sink to the lowest
+means of subsistence.  To be thrifty means for a worker to spend
+less than his income--in other words, to live on less.  This is
+equivalent to a lowering of the standard of living.  In the
+competition for a chance to work, the man with a lower standard of
+living will underbid the man with a higher standard.  And a small
+group of such thrifty workers in any overcrowded industry will
+permanently lower the wages of that industry.  And the thrifty ones
+will no longer be thrifty, for their income will have been reduced
+till it balances their expenditure.
+
+In short, thrift negates thrift.  If every worker in England should
+heed the preachers of thrift and cut expenditure in half, the
+condition of there being more men to work than there is work to do
+would swiftly cut wages in half.  And then none of the workers of
+England would be thrifty, for they would be living up to their
+diminished incomes.  The short-sighted thrift-preachers would
+naturally be astounded at the outcome.  The measure of their failure
+would be precisely the measure of the success of their propaganda.
+And, anyway, it is sheer bosh and nonsense to preach thrift to the
+1,800,000 London workers who are divided into families which have a
+total income of less than 21s. per week, one quarter to one half of
+which must be paid for rent.
+
+Concerning the futility of the people who try to help, I wish to
+make one notable, noble exception, namely, the Dr. Barnardo Homes.
+Dr. Barnardo is a child-catcher.  First, he catches them when they
+are young, before they are set, hardened, in the vicious social
+mould; and then he sends them away to grow up and be formed in
+another and better social mould.  Up to date he has sent out of the
+country 13,340 boys, most of them to Canada, and not one in fifty
+has failed.  A splendid record, when it is considered that these
+lads are waifs and strays, homeless and parentless, jerked out from
+the very bottom of the Abyss, and forty-nine out of fifty of them
+made into men.
+
+Every twenty-four hours in the year Dr. Barnardo snatches nine waifs
+from the streets; so the enormous field he has to work in may be
+comprehended.  The people who try to help have something to learn
+from him.  He does not play with palliatives.  He traces social
+viciousness and misery to their sources.  He removes the progeny of
+the gutter-folk from their pestilential environment, and gives them
+a healthy, wholesome environment in which to be pressed and prodded
+and moulded into men.
+
+When the people who try to help cease their playing and dabbling
+with day nurseries and Japanese art exhibits and go back and learn
+their West End and the sociology of Christ, they will be in better
+shape to buckle down to the work they ought to be doing in the
+world.  And if they do buckle down to the work, they will follow Dr.
+Barnardo's lead, only on a scale as large as the nation is large.
+They won't cram yearnings for the Beautiful, and True, and Good down
+the throat of the woman making violets for three farthings a gross,
+but they will make somebody get off her back and quit cramming
+himself till, like the Romans, he must go to a bath and sweat it
+out.  And to their consternation, they will find that they will have
+to get off that woman's back themselves, as well as the backs of a
+few other women and children they did not dream they were riding
+upon.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVII--THE MANAGEMENT
+
+
+
+In this final chapter it were well to look at the Social Abyss in
+its widest aspect, and to put certain questions to Civilisation, by
+the answers to which Civilisation must stand or fall.  For instance,
+has Civilisation bettered the lot of man?  "Man," I use in its
+democratic sense, meaning the average man.  So the question re-
+shapes itself:  HAS CIVILISATION BETTERED THE LOT OF THE AVERAGE
+MAN?
+
+Let us see.  In Alaska, along the banks of the Yukon River, near its
+mouth, live the Innuit folk.  They are a very primitive people,
+manifesting but mere glimmering adumbrations of that tremendous
+artifice, Civilisation.  Their capital amounts possibly to 2 pounds
+per head.  They hunt and fish for their food with bone-headed spews
+and arrows.  They never suffer from lack of shelter.  Their clothes,
+largely made from the skins of animals, are warm.  They always have
+fuel for their fires, likewise timber for their houses, which they
+build partly underground, and in which they lie snugly during the
+periods of intense cold.  In the summer they live in tents, open to
+every breeze and cool.  They are healthy, and strong, and happy.
+Their one problem is food.  They have their times of plenty and
+times of famine.  In good times they feast; in bad times they die of
+starvation.  But starvation, as a chronic condition, present with a
+large number of them all the time, is a thing unknown.  Further,
+they have no debts.
+
+In the United Kingdom, on the rim of the Western Ocean, live the
+English folk.  They are a consummately civilised people.  Their
+capital amounts to at least 300 pounds per head.  They gain their
+food, not by hunting and fishing, but by toil at colossal artifices.
+For the most part, they suffer from lack of shelter.  The greater
+number of them are vilely housed, do not have enough fuel to keep
+them warm, and are insufficiently clothed.  A constant number never
+have any houses at all, and sleep shelterless under the stars.  Many
+are to be found, winter and summer, shivering on the streets in
+their rags.  They have good times and bad.  In good times most of
+them manage to get enough to eat, in bad times they die of
+starvation.  They are dying now, they were dying yesterday and last
+year, they will die to-morrow and next year, of starvation; for
+they, unlike the Innuit, suffer from a chronic condition of
+starvation.  There are 40,000,000 of the English folk, and 939 out
+of every 1000 of them die in poverty, while a constant army of
+8,000,000 struggles on the ragged edge of starvation.  Further, each
+babe that is born, is born in debt to the sum of 22 pounds.  This is
+because of an artifice called the National Debt.
+
+In a fair comparison of the average Innuit and the average
+Englishman, it will be seen that life is less rigorous for the
+Innuit; that while the Innuit suffers only during bad times from
+starvation, the Englishman suffers during good times as well; that
+no Innuit lacks fuel, clothing, or housing, while the Englishman is
+in perpetual lack of these three essentials.  In this connection it
+is well to instance the judgment of a man such as Huxley.  From the
+knowledge gained as a medical officer in the East End of London, and
+as a scientist pursuing investigations among the most elemental
+savages, he concludes, "Were the alternative presented to me, I
+would deliberately prefer the life of the savage to that of those
+people of Christian London."
+
+The creature comforts man enjoys are the products of man's labour.
+Since Civilisation has failed to give the average Englishman food
+and shelter equal to that enjoyed by the Innuit, the question
+arises:  HAS CIVILISATION INCREASED THE PRODUCING POWER OF THE
+AVERAGE MAN?  If it has not increased man's producing power, then
+Civilisation cannot stand.
+
+But, it will be instantly admitted, Civilisation has increased man's
+producing power.  Five men can produce bread for a thousand.  One
+man can produce cotton cloth for 250 people, woollens for 300, and
+boots and shoes for 1000.  Yet it has been shown throughout the
+pages of this book that English folk by the millions do not receive
+enough food, clothes, and boots.  Then arises the third and
+inexorable question:  IF CIVILISATION HAS INCREASED THE PRODUCING
+POWER OF THE AVERAGE MAN, WHY HAS IT NOT BETTERED THE LOT OF THE
+AVERAGE MAN?
+
+There can be one answer only--MISMANAGEMENT.  Civilisation has made
+possible all manner of creature comforts and heart's delights.  In
+these the average Englishman does not participate.  If he shall be
+forever unable to participate, then Civilisation falls.  There is no
+reason for the continued existence of an artifice so avowed a
+failure.  But it is impossible that men should have reared this
+tremendous artifice in vain.  It stuns the intellect.  To
+acknowledge so crushing a defeat is to give the death-blow to
+striving and progress.
+
+One other alternative, and one other only, presents itself.
+CIVILISATION MUST BE COMPELLED TO BETTER THE LOT OF THE AVERAGE MEN.
+This accepted, it becomes at once a question of business management.
+Things profitable must be continued; things unprofitable must be
+eliminated.  Either the Empire is a profit to England, or it is a
+loss.  If it is a loss, it must be done away with.  If it is a
+profit, it must be managed so that the average man comes in for a
+share of the profit.
+
+If the struggle for commercial supremacy is profitable, continue it.
+If it is not, if it hurts the worker and makes his lot worse than
+the lot of a savage, then fling foreign markets and industrial
+empire overboard.  For it is a patent fact that if 40,000,000
+people, aided by Civilisation, possess a greater individual
+producing power than the Innuit, then those 40,000,000 people should
+enjoy more creature comforts and heart's delights than the Innuits
+enjoy.
+
+If the 400,000 English gentlemen, "of no occupation," according to
+their own statement in the Census of 1881, are unprofitable, do away
+with them.  Set them to work ploughing game preserves and planting
+potatoes.  If they are profitable, continue them by all means, but
+let it be seen to that the average Englishman shares somewhat in the
+profits they produce by working at no occupation.
+
+In short, society must be reorganised, and a capable management put
+at the head.  That the present management is incapable, there can be
+no discussion.  It has drained the United Kingdom of its life-blood.
+It has enfeebled the stay-at-home folk till they are unable longer
+to struggle in the van of the competing nations.  It has built up a
+West End and an East End as large as the Kingdom is large, in which
+one end is riotous and rotten, the other end sickly and underfed.
+
+A vast empire is foundering on the hands of this incapable
+management.  And by empire is meant the political machinery which
+holds together the English-speaking people of the world outside of
+the United States.  Nor is this charged in a pessimistic spirit.
+Blood empire is greater than political empire, and the English of
+the New World and the Antipodes are strong and vigorous as ever.
+But the political empire under which they are nominally assembled is
+perishing.  The political machine known as the British Empire is
+running down.  In the hands of its management it is losing momentum
+every day.
+
+It is inevitable that this management, which has grossly and
+criminally mismanaged, shall be swept away.  Not only has it been
+wasteful and inefficient, but it has misappropriated the funds.
+Every worn-out, pasty-faced pauper, every blind man, every prison
+babe, every man, woman, and child whose belly is gnawing with hunger
+pangs, is hungry because the funds have been misappropriated by the
+management.
+
+Nor can one member of this managing class plead not guilty before
+the judgment bar of Man.  "The living in their houses, and in their
+graves the dead," are challenged by every babe that dies of
+innutrition, by every girl that flees the sweater's den to the
+nightly promenade of Piccadilly, by every worked-out toiler that
+plunges into the canal.  The food this managing class eats, the wine
+it drinks, the shows it makes, and the fine clothes it wears, are
+challenged by eight million mouths which have never had enough to
+fill them, and by twice eight million bodies which have never been
+sufficiently clothed and housed.
+
+There can be no mistake.  Civilisation has increased man's producing
+power an hundred-fold, and through mismanagement the men of
+Civilisation live worse than the beasts, and have less to eat and
+wear and protect them from the elements than the savage Innuit in a
+frigid climate who lives to-day as he lived in the stone age ten
+thousand years ago.
+
+
+CHALLENGE
+
+
+I have a vague remembrance
+Of a story that is told
+In some ancient Spanish legend
+Or chronicle of old.
+
+It was when brave King Sanche
+Was before Zamora slain,
+And his great besieging army
+Lay encamped upon the plain.
+
+Don Diego de Ordenez
+Sallied forth in front of all,
+And shouted loud his challenge
+To the warders on the wall.
+
+All the people of Zamora,
+Both the born and the unborn,
+As traitors did he challenge
+With taunting words of scorn.
+
+The living in their houses,
+And in their graves the dead,
+And the waters in their rivers,
+And their wine, and oil, and bread.
+
+There is a greater army
+That besets us round with strife,
+A starving, numberless army
+At all the gates of life.
+
+The poverty-stricken millions
+Who challenge our wine and bread,
+And impeach us all as traitors,
+Both the living and the dead.
+
+And whenever I sit at the banquet,
+Where the feast and song are high,
+Amid the mirth and music
+I can hear that fearful cry.
+
+And hollow and haggard faces
+Look into the lighted hall,
+And wasted hands are extended
+To catch the crumbs that fall
+
+And within there is light and plenty,
+And odours fill the air;
+But without there is cold and darkness,
+And hunger and despair.
+
+And there in the camp of famine,
+In wind, and cold, and rain,
+Christ, the great Lord of the Army,
+Lies dead upon the plain.
+
+LONGFELLOW
+
+
+
+Footnotes:
+
+{1}  This in the Klondike.--J. L.
+
+{2}  "Runt" in America is the equivalent of the English "crowl," the
+dwarf of a litter.
+
+{3}  The San Francisco bricklayer receives twenty shillings per day,
+and at present is on strike for twenty-four shillings.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg Etext of The People of the Abyss, by Jack London
+
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