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+The Project Gutenberg eBook of The People of the Abyss, by Jack London
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
+most other parts of the world 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.org. If you are not located in the United States, you
+will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before
+using this eBook.
+
+Title: The People of the Abyss
+
+Author: Jack London
+
+Release Date: March, 1999 [eBook #1688]
+[Most recently updated: December 1, 2020]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+Produced by: David Price
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE PEOPLE OF THE ABYSS ***
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+The People of the Abyss
+
+by Jack London
+
+
+Contents
+
+ PREFACE
+ I. THE DESCENT
+ II. JOHNNY UPRIGHT
+ III. MY LODGING AND SOME OTHERS
+ IV. A MAN AND THE ABYSS
+ V. THOSE ON THE EDGE
+ VI. FRYING-PAN ALLEY AND A GLIMPSE OF INFERNO
+ VII. A WINNER OF THE VICTORIA CROSS
+ VIII. THE CARTER AND THE CARPENTER
+ IX. THE SPIKE
+ X. CARRYING THE BANNER
+ XI. THE PEG
+ XII. CORONATION DAY
+ XIII. DAN CULLEN, DOCKER
+ XIV. HOPS AND HOPPERS
+ XV. THE SEA WIFE
+ XVI. PROPERTY VERSUS PERSON
+ XVII. INEFFICIENCY
+ XVIII. WAGES
+ XIX. THE GHETTO
+ XX. COFFEE-HOUSES AND DOSS-HOUSES
+ XXI. THE PRECARIOUSNESS OF LIFE
+ XXII. SUICIDE
+ XXIII. THE CHILDREN
+ XXIV. A VISION OF THE NIGHT
+ XXV. THE HUNGER WAIL
+ XXVI. DRINK, TEMPERANCE, AND THRIFT
+ XXVII. THE MANAGEMENT
+
+
+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 passed 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 I 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 Doré 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
+baccy”—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 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 an’ 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.
+
+ [1] This in the Klondike.—J. L.
+
+
+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.
+
+ [2] “Runt” in America is the equivalent of the English “crowl,” the
+ dwarf of a litter.
+
+
+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, 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 pageant 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 merry, 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 there 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 lumme, look a’ that,” she exclaimed, as we debouched 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 couch, 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 unannaled 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;” “Mr. F---, of brewery fame, who
+rents all the land in this parish, loses £10,000;” 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 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
+our 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 anæmic 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, 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, 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 and costs, Bestwick £2 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 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.
+
+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 each or fourteen days; Murray, £5 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 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, 17s. 4d., and Allen £2, 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 checks
+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. They didn’t reckon that as compensation; they
+said it was only for charity’s sake. Out of that I paid £9 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
+vegetables; 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
+her 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 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
+anæmic, 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 débris 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 his
+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.
+
+ [3] The San Francisco bricklayer receives twenty shillings per day,
+ and at present is on strike for twenty-four shillings.
+
+
+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 case, 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 Overcrowded	Death-rate 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 anæmic. 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 misère_, 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 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 per head.
+They hunt and fish for their food with bone-headed spears 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 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. 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 man_.
+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 Sanchez
+    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,
+vLies dead upon the plain.
+
+
+LONGFELLOW
+
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE PEOPLE OF THE ABYSS ***
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