THE PEOPLE OF THE ABYSS

The chief priests and rulers cry:-

 "O Lord and Master, not ours the guilt, We build but as our fathers built; Behold thine images how they stand Sovereign and sole through all our land. 

 "Our task is hard--with sword and flame, To hold thine earth forever the same, And with sharp crooks of steel to keep, Still as thou leftest them, thy sheep. "

 Then Christ sought out an artisan, A low-browed, stunted, haggard man, And a motherless girl whose fingers thin Crushed from her faintly want and sin. 

 These set he in the midst of them, And as they drew back their garment hem For fear of defilement, "Lo, here, " said he, "The images ye have made of me. "

 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 

PREFACE

The experiences related in this volume fell to me in the summer of 1902. I went down into the under-world of London with an attitude of mind whichI may best liken to that of the explorer. I was open to be convinced bythe evidence of my eyes, rather than by the teachings of those who hadnot 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 ofthe under-world. That which made for more life, for physical andspiritual 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 wasconsidered "good times" in England. The starvation and lack of shelter Iencountered constituted a chronic condition of misery which is neverwiped out, even in the periods of greatest prosperity. 

Following the summer in question came a hard winter. Great numbers ofthe unemployed formed into processions, as many as a dozen at a time, anddaily marched through the streets of London crying for bread. Mr. JustinMcCarthy, 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 arein England is too pessimistic. I must say, in extenuation, that ofoptimists I am the most optimistic. But I measure manhood less bypolitical aggregations than by individuals. Society grows, whilepolitical machines rack to pieces and become "scrap. " For the English, so far as manhood and womanhood and health and happiness go, I see abroad and smiling future. But for a great deal of the politicalmachinery, which at present mismanages for them, I see nothing else thanthe scrap heap. 

JACK LONDON. PIEDMONT, CALIFORNIA. 

CHAPTER I--THE DESCENT

"But you can't do it, you know, " friends said, to whom I applied forassistance in the matter of sinking myself down into the East End ofLondon. "You had better see the police for a guide, " they added, onsecond thought, painfully endeavouring to adjust themselves to thepsychological processes of a madman who had come to them with bettercredentials than brains. 

"But I don't want to see the police, " I protested. "What I wish to do isto go down into the East End and see things for myself. I wish to knowhow those people are living there, and why they are living there, andwhat they are living for. In short, I am going to live there myself. "

"You don't want to _live_ down there!" everybody said, withdisapprobation writ large upon their faces. "Why, it is said there areplaces 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 Iwant you to tell me what you know of the East End, in order that I mayhave something to start on. "

"But we know nothing of the East End. It is over there, somewhere. " Andthey waved their hands vaguely in the direction where the sun on rareoccasions 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, livingsign-posts to all the world, and bestowers of first aid to bewilderedtravellers--unhesitatingly and instantly, with ease and celerity, couldyou send me to Darkest Africa or Innermost Thibet, but to the East End ofLondon, barely a stone's throw distant from Ludgate Circus, you know notthe way!

"You can't do it, you know, " said the human emporium of routes and faresat 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 receiveno call to take them there, and we know nothing whatsoever about theplace at all. "

"Never mind that, " I interposed, to save myself from being swept out ofthe office by his flood of negations. "Here's something you can do forme. I wish you to understand in advance what I intend doing, so that incase of trouble you may be able to identify me. "

"Ah, I see! should you be murdered, we would be in position to identifythe corpse. "

He said it so cheerfully and cold-bloodedly that on the instant I saw mystark and mutilated cadaver stretched upon a slab where cool waterstrickle ceaselessly, and him I saw bending over and sadly and patientlyidentifying it as the body of the insane American who _would_ see theEast End. 

"No, no, " I answered; "merely to identify me in case I get into a scrapewith the 'bobbies. '" This last I said with a thrill; truly, I wasgripping 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, " heexplained, "to give no information concerning our clients. "

"But in this case, " I urged, "it is the client who requests you to givethe 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 EastEnd, 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 andhawing, no lifted brows, open incredulity, or blank amazement. In oneminute I explained myself and my project, which he accepted as a matterof course. In the second minute he asked my age, height, and weight, andlooked 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 nowfree to plunge into that human wilderness of which nobody seemed to knowanything. But at once I encountered a new difficulty in the shape of mycabby, a grey-whiskered and eminently decorous personage who hadimperturbably 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 apuzzled stop. The aperture above my head was uncovered, and the cabmanpeered down perplexedly at me. 

"I say, " he said, "wot plyce yer wanter go?"

"East End, " I repeated. "Nowhere in particular. Just drive me aroundanywhere. "

"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, andgrumblingly started his horse. 

Nowhere in the streets of London may one escape the sight of abjectpoverty, while five minutes' walk from almost any point will bring one toa slum; but the region my hansom was now penetrating was one unendingslum. The streets were filled with a new and different race of people, short of stature, and of wretched or beer-sodden appearance. We rolledalong through miles of bricks and squalor, and from each cross street andalley flashed long vistas of bricks and misery. Here and there lurched adrunken man or woman, and the air was obscene with sounds of jangling andsquabbling. At a market, tottery old men and women were searching in thegarbage thrown in the mud for rotten potatoes, beans, and vegetables, while little children clustered like flies around a festering mass offruit, thrusting their arms to the shoulders into the liquid corruption, and drawing forth morsels but partially decayed, which they devoured onthe spot. 

Not a hansom did I meet with in all my drive, while mine was like anapparition from another and better world, the way the children ran afterit and alongside. And as far as I could see were the solid walls ofbrick, the slimy pavements, and the screaming streets; and for the firsttime in my life the fear of the crowd smote me. It was like the fear ofthe sea; and the miserable multitudes, street upon street, seemed so manywaves of a vast and malodorous sea, lapping about me and threatening towell up and over me. 

"Stepney, sir; Stepney Station, " the cabby called down. 

I looked about. It was really a railroad station, and he had drivendesperately to it as the one familiar spot he had ever heard of in allthat 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 wantStepney 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 eyeout for a shop where old clothes are sold. Now, when you see such ashop, 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 longafterwards he pulled up to the curb and informed me that an old-clothesshop 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, " heretorted. 

But a crowd of ragged onlookers had already gathered around the cab, andI laughed again and walked back to the old-clothes shop. 

Here the chief difficulty was in making the shopman understand that Ireally and truly wanted old clothes. But after fruitless attempts topress upon me new and impossible coats and trousers, he began to bring tolight 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, intopaying heavily for my purchases. A man in trouble, or a high-classcriminal from across the water, was what he took my measure for--ineither case, a person anxious to avoid the police. 

But I disputed with him over the outrageous difference between prices andvalues, till I quite disabused him of the notion, and he settled down todrive a hard bargain with a hard customer. In the end I selected a pairof stout though well-worn trousers, a frayed jacket with one remainingbutton, a pair of brogans which had plainly seen service where coal wasshovelled, a thin leather belt, and a very dirty cloth cap. Myunderclothing and socks, however, were new and warm, but of the sort thatany American waif, down in his luck, could acquire in the ordinary courseof events. 

"I must sy yer a sharp 'un, " he said, with counterfeit admiration, as Ihanded over the ten shillings finally agreed upon for the outfit. "Blimey, if you ain't ben up an' down Petticut Lane afore now. Yertrouseys is wuth five bob to hany man, an' a docker 'ud give two an' sixfor the shoes, to sy nothin' of the coat an' cap an' new stoker's singletan' hother things. "

"How much will you give me for them?" I demanded suddenly. "I paid youten bob for the lot, and I'll sell them back to you, right now, foreight! 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 thelatter, after looking me over sharply, and particularly scrutinizing thebundle under my arm, turned away and left the cabby to wax mutinous byhimself. And not a step would he budge till I paid him the sevenshillings and sixpence owing him. Whereupon he was willing to drive meto the ends of the earth, apologising profusely for his insistence, andexplaining that one ran across queer customers in London Town. 

But he drove me only to Highbury Vale, in North London, where my luggagewas waiting for me. Here, next day, I took off my shoes (not withoutregret for their lightness and comfort), and my soft, grey travellingsuit, and, in fact, all my clothing; and proceeded to array myself in theclothes of the other and unimaginable men, who must have been indeedunfortunate to have had to part with such rags for the pitiable sumsobtainable from a dealer. 

Inside my stoker's singlet, in the armpit, I sewed a gold sovereign (anemergency sum certainly of modest proportions); and inside my stoker'ssinglet I put myself. And then I sat down and moralised upon the fairyears and fat, which had made my skin soft and brought the nerves closeto the surface; for the singlet was rough and raspy as a hair shirt, andI am confident that the most rigorous of ascetics suffer no more than Idid in the ensuing twenty-four hours. 

The remainder of my costume was fairly easy to put on, though thebrogans, or brogues, were quite a problem. As stiff and hard as if madeof wood, it was only after a prolonged pounding of the uppers with myfists that I was able to get my feet into them at all. Then, with a fewshillings, a knife, a handkerchief, and some brown papers and flaketobacco stowed away in my pockets, I thumped down the stairs and saidgood-bye to my foreboding friends. As I paused out of the door, the"help, " a comely middle-aged woman, could not conquer a grin that twistedher 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 differencein status effected by my clothes. All servility vanished from thedemeanour of the common people with whom I came in contact. Presto! inthe twinkling of an eye, so to say, I had become one of them. My frayedand 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 thefawning and too respectful attention I had hitherto received, I nowshared with them a comradeship. The man in corduroy and dirtyneckerchief 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 andgladness, which the other term does not possess. Governor! It smacks ofmastery, and power, and high authority--the tribute of the man who isunder to the man on top, delivered in the hope that he will let up a bitand ease his weight, which is another way of saying that it is an appealfor alms. 

This brings me to a delight I experienced in my rags and tatters which isdenied the average American abroad. The European traveller from theStates, who is not a Croesus, speedily finds himself reduced to a chronicstate of self-conscious sordidness by the hordes of cringing robbers whoclutter his steps from dawn till dark, and deplete his pocket-book in away that puts compound interest to the blush. 

In my rags and tatters I escaped the pestilence of tipping, andencountered men on a basis of equality. Nay, before the day was out Iturned the tables, and said, most gratefully, "Thank you, sir, " to agentleman 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, morelively in avoiding vehicles, and it was strikingly impressed upon me thatmy life had cheapened in direct ratio with my clothes. When before Iinquired the way of a policeman, I was usually asked, "Bus or 'ansom, sir?" But now the query became, "Walk or ride?" Also, at the railwaystations, a third-class ticket was now shoved out to me as a matter ofcourse. 

But there was compensation for it all. For the first time I met theEnglish lower classes face to face, and knew them for what they were. When loungers and workmen, at street corners and in public-houses, talkedwith me, they talked as one man to another, and they talked as naturalmen should talk, without the least idea of getting anything out of me forwhat they talked or the way they talked. 

And when at last I made into the East End, I was gratified to find thatthe 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 slippedgently into it, and there was nothing fearsome about it--with the oneexception of the stoker's singlet. 

CHAPTER II--JOHNNY UPRIGHT

I shall not give you the address of Johnny Upright. Let it suffice thathe lives in the most respectable street in the East End--a street thatwould be considered very mean in America, but a veritable oasis in thedesert of East London. It is surrounded on every side by close-packedsqualor and streets jammed by a young and vile and dirty generation; butits own pavements are comparatively bare of the children who have noother place to play, while it has an air of desertion, so few are thepeople that come and go. 

Each house in this street, as in all the streets, is shoulder to shoulderwith its neighbours. To each house there is but one entrance, the frontdoor; 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 aslate-coloured sky. But it must be understood that this is East Endopulence we are now considering. Some of the people in this street areeven so well-to-do as to keep a "slavey. " Johnny Upright keeps one, as Iwell know, she being my first acquaintance in this particular portion ofthe 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 waswith pity and contempt that she looked at me. She evinced a plain desirethat our conversation should be short. It was Sunday, and Johnny Uprightwas 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. JohnnyUpright was attracted to the door, where she scolded the girl for nothaving closed it before turning her attention to me. 

No, Mr. Johnny Upright was not at home, and further, he saw nobody onSunday. It is too bad, said I. Was I looking for work? No, quite thecontrary; in fact, I had come to see Johnny Upright on business whichmight be profitable to him. 

A change came over the face of things at once. The gentleman in questionwas at church, but would be home in an hour or thereabouts, when no doubthe could be seen. 

Would I kindly step in?--no, the lady did not ask me, though I fished foran invitation by stating that I would go down to the corner and wait in apublic-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 ofbetter, I took a seat on a neighbourly doorstep and waited. 

And here to the doorstep came the "slavey, " very frowzy and veryperplexed, to tell me that the missus would let me come back and wait inthe kitchen. 

"So many people come 'ere lookin' for work, " Mrs. Johnny Uprightapologetically explained. "So I 'ope you won't feel bad the way Ispoke. "

"Not at all, not at all, " I replied in my grandest manner, for the nonceinvesting my rags with dignity. "I quite understand, I assure you. Isuppose people looking for work almost worry you to death?"

"That they do, " she answered, with an eloquent and expressive glance; andthereupon ushered me into, not the kitchen, but the dining room--afavour, I took it, in recompense for my grand manner. 

This dining-room, on the same floor as the kitchen, was about four feetbelow the level of the ground, and so dark (it was midday) that I had towait a space for my eyes to adjust themselves to the gloom. Dirty lightfiltered in through a window, the top of which was on a level with asidewalk, and in this light I found that I was able to read newspaperprint. 

And here, while waiting the coming of Johnny Upright, let me explain myerrand. While living, eating, and sleeping with the people of the EastEnd, it was my intention to have a port of refuge, not too far distant, into which could run now and again to assure myself that good clothes andcleanliness still existed. Also in such port I could receive my mail, work up my notes, and sally forth occasionally in changed garb tocivilisation. 

But this involved a dilemma. A lodging where my property would be safeimplied a landlady apt to be suspicious of a gentleman leading a doublelife; while a landlady who would not bother her head over the double lifeof her lodgers would imply lodgings where property was unsafe. To avoidthe dilemma was what had brought me to Johnny Upright. A detective ofthirty-odd years' continuous service in the East End, known far and wideby a name given him by a convicted felon in the dock, he was just the manto find me an honest landlady, and make her rest easy concerning thestrange comings and goings of which I might be guilty. 

His two daughters beat him home from church--and pretty girls they werein their Sunday dresses; withal it was the certain weak and delicateprettiness which characterises the Cockney lasses, a prettiness which isno more than a promise with no grip on time, and doomed to fade quicklyaway like the colour from a sunset sky. 

They looked me over with frank curiosity, as though I were some sort of astrange animal, and then ignored me utterly for the rest of my wait. ThenJohnny Upright himself arrived, and I was summoned upstairs to conferwith him. 

"Speak loud, " he interrupted my opening words. "I've got a bad cold, andI can't hear well. "

Shades of Old Sleuth and Sherlock Holmes! I wondered as to where theassistant was located whose duty it was to take down whatever informationI might loudly vouchsafe. And to this day, much as I have seen of JohnnyUpright and much as I have puzzled over the incident, I have never beenquite able to make up my mind as to whether or not he had a cold, or hadan assistant planted in the other room. But of one thing I am sure:though I gave Johnny Upright the facts concerning myself and project, hewithheld judgment till next day, when I dodged into his streetconventionally garbed and in a hansom. Then his greeting was cordialenough, 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 takeus for what we are, in our humble way. "

The girls were flushed and embarrassed at greeting me, while he did notmake it any the easier for them. 

"Ha! ha!" he roared heartily, slapping the table with his open hand tillthe dishes rang. "The girls thought yesterday you had come to ask for apiece 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 discernunder his rags a man who had no need to go ragged. 

And then, while I ate bread and marmalade, proceeded a play at crosspurposes, the daughters deeming it an insult to me that I should havebeen mistaken for a beggar, and the father considering it as the highestcompliment to my cleverness to succeed in being so mistaken. All ofwhich I enjoyed, and the bread, the marmalade, and the tea, till the timecame 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 houseas 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 adollar and a half, per week, was a most comfortable affair. From theAmerican standpoint, on the other hand, it was rudely furnished, uncomfortable, and small. By the time I had added an ordinary typewritertable to its scanty furnishing, I was hard put to turn around; at thebest, I managed to navigate it by a sort of vermicular progressionrequiring great dexterity and presence of mind. 

Having settled myself, or my property rather, I put on my knockaboutclothes and went out for a walk. Lodgings being fresh in my mind, Ibegan to look them up, bearing in mind the hypothesis that I was a pooryoung man with a wife and large family. 

My first discovery was that empty houses were few and far between--so farbetween, in fact, that though I walked miles in irregular circles over alarge area, I still remained between. Not one empty house could I find--aconclusive proof that the district was "saturated. "

It being plain that as a poor young man with a family I could rent nohouses at all in this most undesirable region, I next looked for rooms, unfurnished rooms, in which I could store my wife and babies andchattels. There were not many, but I found them, usually in thesingular, for one appears to be considered sufficient for a poor man'sfamily 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 acertain 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 muchspace to spare as to be able to take in a lodger or two. When such roomscan be rented for from three to six shillings per week, it is a fairconclusion that a lodger with references should obtain floor space for, say, from eightpence to a shilling. He may even be able to board withthe sublettees for a few shillings more. This, however, I failed toinquire into--a reprehensible error on my part, considering that I wasworking on the basis of a hypothetical family. 

Not only did the houses I investigated have no bath-tubs, but I learnedthat 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 lodgerssuffering from the too great spaciousness of one room, taking a bath in atin wash-basin would be an unfeasible undertaking. But, it seems, thecompensation comes in with the saving of soap, so all's well, and God'sstill in heaven. 

However, I rented no rooms, but returned to my own Johnny Upright'sstreet. What with my wife, and babies, and lodgers, and the variouscubby-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. Theimmensity of it was awe-inspiring. Could this be the room I had rentedfor six shillings a week? Impossible! But my landlady, knocking at thedoor to learn if I were comfortable, dispelled my doubts. 

"Oh yes, sir, " she said, in reply to a question. "This street is thevery 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 ourkind 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 rentalvalue of a neighbourhood went up, while its tone went down. 

"You see, sir, our kind are not used to crowding in the way the othersdo. We need more room. The others, the foreigners and lower-classpeople, can get five and six families into this house, where we only getone. 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 thisneighbourhood was just as nice as it could be. "

I looked at her. Here was a woman, of the finest grade of the Englishworking-class, with numerous evidences of refinement, being slowlyengulfed by that noisome and rotten tide of humanity which the powersthat be are pouring eastward out of London Town. Bank, factory, hotel, and office building must go up, and the city poor folk are a nomadicbreed; so they migrate eastward, wave upon wave, saturating and degradingneighbourhood by neighbourhood, driving the better class of workersbefore them to pioneer, on the rim of the city, or dragging them down, ifnot in the first generation, surely in the second and third. 

It is only a question of months when Johnny Upright's street must go. Herealises it himself. 

"In a couple of years, " he says, "my lease expires. My landlord is oneof our kind. He has not put up the rent on any of his houses here, andthis has enabled us to stay. But any day he may sell, or any day he maydie, which is the same thing so far as we are concerned. The house isbought by a money breeder, who builds a sweat shop on the patch of groundat the rear where my grapevine is, adds to the house, and rents it a roomto a family. There you are, and Johnny Upright's gone!"

And truly I saw Johnny Upright, and his good wife and fair daughters, andfrowzy 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 thefringe of the city, live the small business men, little managers, andsuccessful clerks. They dwell in cottages and semi-detached villas, withbits of flower garden, and elbow room, and breathing space. They inflatethemselves with pride, and throw out their chests when they contemplatethe Abyss from which they have escaped, and they thank God that they arenot as other men. And lo! down upon them comes Johnny Upright and themonster city at his heels. Tenements spring up like magic, gardens arebuilt upon, villas are divided and subdivided into many dwellings, andthe 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 andelderly woman, of whose fare I was partaking in a greasy coffee-housedown near the Pool and not very far from Limehouse. 

"Oh yus, " she answered shortly, my appearance possibly not approximatingthe standard of affluence required by her house. 

I said no more, consuming my rasher of bacon and pint of sickly tea insilence. Nor did she take further interest in me till I came to pay myreckoning (fourpence), when I pulled all of ten shillings out of mypocket. The expected result was produced. 

"Yus, sir, " she at once volunteered; "I 'ave nice lodgin's you'd likelytyke 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, notto 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 havea 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 verysmall room. "

"How much?" I demanded. 

"'Arf a crown a week, two an' six, to a regular lodger. You'll fancy themen, I'm sure. One works in the ware'ouse, an' 'e's been with me twoyears now. An' the hother's bin with me six--six years, sir, an' twomonths comin' nex' Saturday. 'E's a scene-shifter, " she went on. "Asteady, respectable man, never missin' a night's work in the time 'e'sbin with me. An' 'e likes the 'ouse; 'e says as it's the best 'e can doin 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 andunlimited air for a thousand Londons; and here was this man, a steady andreliable man, never missing a night's work, frugal and honest, lodging inone room with two other men, paying two dollars and a half per month forit, 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, ableto enter in with my rags and take up my bed with him. The human soul isa lonely thing, but it must be very lonely sometimes when there are threebeds 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 smallkitchen in which she cooked the food for her lodgers who were alsoboarders. When I first entered, she had been hard at work, nor had shelet up once throughout the conversation. Undoubtedly she was a busywoman. "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 afoul and noisome coffee-house that faced on an alley ten feet between thewalls, and a waterside environment that was ugly and sickening, to saythe least. 

"You'll be hin hagain to 'ave a look?" she questioned wistfully, as Iwent out of the door. 

And as I turned and looked at her, I realized to the full the deepertruth 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, youknow, a rest. "

"Lor' lumme!" she laughed, for the first time stopping from her work. "Avycytion, eh? for the likes o' me? Just fancy, now!--Mind yerfeet!"--this last sharply, and to me, as I stumbled over the rottenthreshold. 

Down near the West India Dock I came upon a young fellow staringdisconsolately at the muddy water. A fireman's cap was pulled downacross his eyes, and the fit and sag of his clothes whisperedunmistakably of the sea. 

"Hello, mate, " I greeted him, sparring for a beginning. "Can you tell methe way to Wapping?"

"Worked yer way over on a cattle boat?" he countered, fixing mynationality 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 closerintimacy, so that when I brought to light all of a shilling's worth ofcoppers (ostensibly my all), and put aside sixpence for a bed, andsixpence for more arf an' arf, he generously proposed that we drink upthe whole shilling. 

"My mate, 'e cut up rough las' night, " he explained. "An' the bobbiesgot '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'sworth 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 wasrepresentative of a large body of the lower-class London workman, mylater experience substantiates. 

He was London-born, his father a fireman and a drinker before him. As achild, his home was the streets and the docks. He had never learned toread, and had never felt the need for it--a vain and uselessaccomplishment, he held, at least for a man of his station in life. 

He had had a mother and numerous squalling brothers and sisters, allcrammed into a couple of rooms and living on poorer and less regular foodthan he could ordinarily rustle for himself. In fact, he never went homeexcept at periods when he was unfortunate in procuring his own food. Petty pilfering and begging along the streets and docks, a trip or two tosea as mess-boy, a few trips more as coal-trimmer, and then afull-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 sensibleone from his point of view. When I asked him what he lived for, heimmediately answered, "Booze. " A voyage to sea (for a man must live andget the wherewithal), and then the paying off and the big drunk at theend. After that, haphazard little drunks, sponged in the "pubs" frommates with a few coppers left, like myself, and when sponging was playedout another trip to sea and a repetition of the beastly cycle. 

"But women, " I suggested, when he had finished proclaiming booze the soleend of existence. 

"Wimmen!" He thumped his pot upon the bar and orated eloquently. "Wimmenis 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' theole man mis'rable when 'e come 'ome, w'ich was seldom, I grant. An' ferw'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 fewshillin'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 'eain't 'ad 'ardly a glass. I know. I've 'ad my fling, an' I know wot'swot. An' I tell you, where's wimmen is trouble--screechin' an' carryin'on, fightin', cuttin', bobbies, magistrates, an' a month's 'ard labourback of it all, an' no pay-day when you come out. "

"But a wife and children, " I insisted. "A home of your own, and allthat. Think of it, back from a voyage, little children climbing on yourknee, and the wife happy and smiling, and a kiss for you when she laysthe table, and a kiss all round from the babies when they go to bed, andthe kettle singing and the long talk afterwards of where you've been andwhat you've seen, and of her and all the little happenings at home whileyou've been away, and--"

"Garn!" he cried, with a playful shove of his fist on my shoulder. "Wot'syer 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'enyou 'aven't. I'll tell you wot I'd get on four poun' ten--a missusrowin', kids squallin', no coal t' make the kettle sing, an' the kettleup the spout, that's wot I'd get. Enough t' make a bloke bloomin' wellglad 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! Ican 'ave my beer w'en I like, an' no blessed missus an' kids a-crying forbread. I'm 'appy, I am, with my beer an' mates like you, an' a good shipcomin', an' another trip to sea. So I say, let's 'ave another pint. Arfan' 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 andthe underlying economic reason for it. Home life he had never known. Theword "home" aroused nothing but unpleasant associations. In the lowwages of his father, and of other men in the same walk in life, he foundsufficient reason for branding wife and children as encumbrances andcauses of masculine misery. An unconscious hedonist, utterly unmoral andmaterialistic, he sought the greatest possible happiness for himself, andfound 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 theforces of his environment had tended to harden him, and he viewed hiswretched, inevitable future with a callousness and unconcern I could notshake. 

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 wereblue and round, shaded by long lashes, and wide apart. And there was alaugh in them, and a fund of humour behind. The brow and generalfeatures were good, the mouth and lips sweet, though already developing aharsh twist. The chin was weak, but not too weak; I have seen mensitting in the high places with weaker. 

His head was shapely, and so gracefully was it poised upon a perfect neckthat 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 ofgood blood and upbringing, but I have never seen one who stripped tobetter advantage than this young sot of two-and-twenty, this young goddoomed to rack and ruin in four or five short years, and to pass hencewithout posterity to receive the splendid heritage it was his tobequeath. 

It seemed sacrilege to waste such life, and yet I was forced to confessthat he was right in not marrying on four pounds ten in London Town. Justas the scene-shifter was happier in making both ends meet in a roomshared with two other men, than he would have been had he packed a feeblefamily along with a couple of men into a cheaper room, and failed inmaking both ends meet. 

And day by day I became convinced that not only is it unwise, but it iscriminal for the people of the Abyss to marry. They are the stones bythe builder rejected. There is no place for them, in the social fabric, while all the forces of society drive them downward till they perish. Atthe bottom of the Abyss they are feeble, besotted, and imbecile. If theyreproduce, the life is so cheap that perforce it perishes of itself. Thework of the world goes on above them, and they do not care to take partin it, nor are they able. Moreover, the work of the world does not needthem. There are plenty, far fitter than they, clinging to the steepslope above, and struggling frantically to slide no more. 

In short, the London Abyss is a vast shambles. Year by year, and decadeafter decade, rural England pours in a flood of vigorous strong life, that not only does not renew itself, but perishes by the thirdgeneration. Competent authorities aver that the London workman whoseparents and grand-parents were born in London is so remarkable a specimenthat he is rarely found. 

Mr. A. C. Pigou has said that the aged poor, and the residuum whichcompose the "submerged tenth, " constitute 71 per cent, of the populationof London. Which is to say that last year, and yesterday, and to-day, atthis very moment, 450, 000 of these creatures are dying miserably at thebottom of the social pit called "London. " As to how they die, I shalltake 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 isthe smug complacency with which the officials looked upon it and renderedjudgment. That an old woman of seventy-seven years of age should die ofSELF-NEGLECT is the most optimistic way possible of looking at it. Itwas the old dead woman's fault that she died, and having located theresponsibility, society goes contentedly on about its own affairs. 

Of the "submerged tenth" Mr. Pigou has said: "Either through lack ofbodily strength, or of intelligence, or of fibre, or of all three, theyare inefficient or unwilling workers, and consequently unable to supportthemselves . . . They are often so degraded in intellect as to beincapable of distinguishing their right from their left hand, or ofrecognising the numbers of their own houses; their bodies are feeble andwithout stamina, their affections are warped, and they scarcely know whatfamily life means. "

Four hundred and fifty thousand is a whole lot of people. The youngfireman was only one, and it took him some time to say his little say. Ishould not like to hear them all talk at once. I wonder if God hearsthem?

CHAPTER V--THOSE ON THE EDGE

My first impression of East London was naturally a general one. Laterthe details began to appear, and here and there in the chaos of misery Ifound little spots where a fair measure of happiness reigned--sometimeswhole rows of houses in little out-of-the-way streets, where artisansdwell and where a rude sort of family life obtains. In the evenings themen can be seen at the doors, pipes in their mouths and children on theirknees, wives gossiping, and laughter and fun going on. The content ofthese people is manifestly great, for, relative to the wretchedness thatencompasses them, they are well off. 

But at the best, it is a dull, animal happiness, the content of the fullbelly. The dominant note of their lives is materialistic. They arestupid and heavy, without imagination. The Abyss seems to exude astupefying atmosphere of torpor, which wraps about them and deadens them. Religion passes them by. The Unseen holds for them neither terror nordelight. They are unaware of the Unseen; and the full belly and theevening pipe, with their regular "arf an' arf, " is all they demand, ordream of demanding, from existence. 

This would not be so bad if it were all; but it is not all. Thesatisfied torpor in which they are sunk is the deadly inertia thatprecedes dissolution. There is no progress, and with them not toprogress is to fall back and into the Abyss. In their own lives they mayonly start to fall, leaving the fall to be completed by their childrenand their children's children. Man always gets less than he demands fromlife; and so little do they demand, that the less than little they getcannot save them. 

At the best, city life is an unnatural life for the human; but the citylife of London is so utterly unnatural that the average workman orworkwoman cannot stand it. Mind and body are sapped by the undermininginfluences ceaselessly at work. Moral and physical stamina are broken, and the good workman, fresh from the soil, becomes in the first citygeneration a poor workman; and by the second city generation, devoid ofpush and go and initiative, and actually unable physically to perform thelabour his father did, he is well on the way to the shambles at thebottom of the Abyss. 

If nothing else, the air he breathes, and from which he never escapes, issufficient to weaken him mentally and physically, so that he becomesunable to compete with the fresh virile life from the country hasteningon to London Town to destroy and be destroyed. 

Leaving out the disease germs that fill the air of the East End, considerbut the one item of smoke. Sir William Thiselton-Dyer, curator of KewGardens, has been studying smoke deposits on vegetation, and, accordingto his calculations, no less than six tons of solid matter, consisting ofsoot and tarry hydrocarbons, are deposited every week on every quarter ofa square mile in and about London. This is equivalent to twenty-fourtons per week to the square mile, or 1248 tons per year to the squaremile. From the cornice below the dome of St. Paul's Cathedral wasrecently taken a solid deposit of crystallised sulphate of lime. Thisdeposit had been formed by the action of the sulphuric acid in theatmosphere upon the carbonate of lime in the stone. And this sulphuricacid in the atmosphere is constantly being breathed by the London workmenthrough 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, listlessbreed, that crumples up and goes down in the brute struggle for life withthe invading hordes from the country. The railway men, carriers, omnibusdrivers, corn and timber porters, and all those who require physicalstamina, are largely drawn from the country; while in the MetropolitanPolice there are, roughly, 12, 000 country-born as against 3000 London-born. 

So one is forced to conclude that the Abyss is literally a hugeman-killing machine, and when I pass along the little out-of-the-waystreets with the full-bellied artisans at the doors, I am aware of agreater sorrow for them than for the 450, 000 lost and hopeless wretchesdying at the bottom of the pit. They, at least, are dying, that is thepoint; while these have yet to go through the slow and preliminary pangsextending through two and even three generations. 

And yet the quality of the life is good. All human potentialities are init. Given proper conditions, it could live through the centuries, andgreat men, heroes and masters, spring from it and make the world betterby having lived. 

I talked with a woman who was representative of that type which has beenjerked out of its little out-of-the-way streets and has started on thefatal fall to the bottom. Her husband was a fitter and a member of theEngineers' Union. That he was a poor engineer was evidenced by hisinability to get regular employment. He did not have the energy andenterprise necessary to obtain or hold a steady position. 

The pair had two daughters, and the four of them lived in a couple ofholes, called "rooms" by courtesy, for which they paid seven shillingsper week. They possessed no stove, managing their cooking on a singlegas-ring in the fireplace. Not being persons of property, they wereunable to obtain an unlimited supply of gas; but a clever machine hadbeen installed for their benefit. By dropping a penny in the slot, thegas was forthcoming, and when a penny's worth had forthcome the supplywas 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 andmonth out, they had arisen from the table able and willing to eat more. And when once on the downward slope, chronic innutrition is an importantfactor in sapping vitality and hastening the descent. 

Yet this woman was a hard worker. From 4. 30 in the morning till the lastlight 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 adozen! 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, whenstrikes were afoot and he chanced to be working, he had at times beencompelled to pay as high as seventeen shillings into the union's coffersfor the relief fund. 

One daughter, the elder, had worked as green hand for a dressmaker, forone shilling and sixpence per week--37. 5 cents per week, or a fractionover 5 cents per day. However, when the slack season came she wasdischarged, though she had been taken on at such low pay with theunderstanding that she was to learn the trade and work up. After thatshe had been employed in a bicycle store for three years, for which shereceived five shillings per week, walking two miles to her work, and twoback, and being fined for tardiness. 

As far as the man and woman were concerned, the game was played. Theyhad lost handhold and foothold, and were falling into the pit. But whatof the daughters? Living like swine, enfeebled by chronic innutrition, being sapped mentally, morally, and physically, what chance have they tocrawl 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 afree-for-all, rough-and-tumble fight going on in the yard that is back toback with my yard. When the first sounds reached me I took it for thebarking and snarling of dogs, and some minutes were required to convinceme that human beings, and women at that, could produce such a fearfulclamour. 

Drunken women fighting! It is not nice to think of; it is far worse tolisten to. Something like this it runs--

Incoherent babble, shrieked at the top of the lungs of several women; alull, in which is heard a child crying and a young girl's voice pleadingtearfully; a woman's voice rises, harsh and grating, "You 'it me! Jestyou 'it me!" then, swat! challenge accepted and fight rages afresh. 

The back windows of the houses commanding the scene are lined withenthusiastic spectators, and the sound of blows, and of oaths that makeone's blood run cold, are borne to my ears. Happily, I cannot see thecombatants. 

A lull; "You let that child alone!" child, evidently of few years, screaming in downright terror. "Awright, " repeated insistently and attop 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 beingresuscitated; child's voice audible again, but now sunk to a lower noteof 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. Onecombatant gets overwhelming advantage, and follows it up from the way theother combatant screams bloody murder. Bloody murder gurgles and diesout, undoubtedly throttled by a strangle hold. 

Entrance of new voices; a flank attack; strangle hold suddenly brokenfrom 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!" renewedconflict, mothers, daughters, everybody, during which my landlady callsher young daughter in from the back steps, while I wonder what will bethe 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 aslender lad of nineteen, so slight and frail, in fact, that, like FraLippo Lippi, a puff of wind might double him up and turn him over. Hewas a burning young socialist, in the first throes of enthusiasm and ripefor martyrdom. As platform speaker or chairman he had taken an activeand dangerous part in the many indoor and outdoor pro-Boer meetings whichhave vexed the serenity of Merry England these several years back. Littleitems he had been imparting to me as he walked along; of being mobbed inparks and on tram-cars; of climbing on the platform to lead the forlornhope, when brother speaker after brother speaker had been dragged down bythe angry crowd and cruelly beaten; of a siege in a church, where he andthree others had taken sanctuary, and where, amid flying missiles and thecrashing of stained glass, they had fought off the mob till rescued byplatoons 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 aregretful sigh, he looked at me and said: "How I envy you big, strongmen! 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 myown husky West, and the stalwart men it had been my custom, in turn, toenvy there. Also, as I looked at the mite of a youth with the heart of alion, I thought, this is the type that on occasion rears barricades andshows the world that men have not forgotten how to die. 

But up spoke my other companion, a man of twenty-eight, who eked out aprecarious existence in a sweating den. 

"I'm a 'earty man, I am, " he announced. "Not like the other chaps at myshop, I ain't. They consider me a fine specimen of manhood. W'y, d' yeknow, 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 gnarledand twisted out of all decency, contracted chest, shoulders bentprodigiously from long hours of toil, and head hanging heavily forwardand 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. PassingLeman Street, we cut off to the left into Spitalfields, and dived intoFrying-pan Alley. A spawn of children cluttered the slimy pavement, forall the world like tadpoles just turned frogs on the bottom of a drypond. In a narrow doorway, so narrow that perforce we stepped over her, sat a woman with a young babe, nursing at breasts grossly naked andlibelling all the sacredness of motherhood. In the black and narrow hallbehind her we waded through a mess of young life, and essayed an evennarrower and fouler stairway. Up we went, three flights, each landingtwo feet by three in area, and heaped with filth and refuse. 

There were seven rooms in this abomination called a house. In six of therooms, twenty-odd people, of both sexes and all ages, cooked, ate, slept, and worked. In size the rooms averaged eight feet by eight, or possiblynine. 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 whichthe work was performed took up the major portion of the space. On thistable were five lasts, and there was barely room for the men to stand totheir work, for the rest of the space was heaped with cardboard, leather, bundles of shoe uppers, and a miscellaneous assortment of materials usedin attaching the uppers of shoes to their soles. 

In the adjoining room lived a woman and six children. In another vilehole lived a widow, with an only son of sixteen who was dying ofconsumption. The woman hawked sweetmeats on the street, I was told, andmore often failed than not to supply her son with the three quarts ofmilk he daily required. Further, this son, weak and dying, did not tastemeat oftener than once a week; and the kind and quality of this meatcannot possibly be imagined by people who have never watched human swineeat. 

"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 menaceadded to the hostile environment of the children of the slum. 

My sweated friend, when work was to be had, toiled with four other men inhis eight-by-seven room. In the winter a lamp burned nearly all the dayand added its fumes to the over-loaded air, which was breathed, andbreathed, and breathed again. 

In good times, when there was a rush of work, this man told me that hecould earn as high as "thirty bob a week. "--Thirty shillings! Sevendollars and a half!

"But it's only the best of us can do it, " he qualified. "An' then wework 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 themetallic 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 plainthat his thirty bob was a diminishing quantity. 

"But how long does the rush season last, in which you receive this highwage of thirty bob?" I asked. 

"Four months, " was the answer; and for the rest of the year, he informedme, they average from "half a quid" to a "quid" a week, which isequivalent to from two dollars and a half to five dollars. The presentweek was half gone, and he had earned four bob, or one dollar. And yet Iwas given to understand that this was one of the better grades ofsweating. 

I looked out of the window, which should have commanded the back yards ofthe neighbouring buildings. But there were no back yards, or, rather, they were covered with one-storey hovels, cowsheds, in which peoplelived. The roofs of these hovels were covered with deposits of filth, insome places a couple of feet deep--the contributions from the backwindows of the second and third storeys. I could make out fish and meatbones, garbage, pestilential rags, old boots, broken earthenware, and allthe general refuse of a human sty. 

"This is the last year of this trade; they're getting machines to do awaywith us, " said the sweated one mournfully, as we stepped over the womanwith the breasts grossly naked and waded anew through the cheap younglife. 

We next visited the municipal dwellings erected by the London CountyCouncil on the site of the slums where lived Arthur Morrison's "Child ofthe Jago. " While the buildings housed more people than before, it wasmuch healthier. But the dwellings were inhabited by the better-classworkmen and artisans. The slum people had simply drifted on to crowdother slums or to form new slums. 

"An' now, " said the sweated one, the 'earty man who worked so fast as todazzle one's eyes, "I'll show you one of London's lungs. This isSpitalfields Garden. " And he mouthed the word "garden" with scorn. 

The shadow of Christ's Church falls across Spitalfields Garden, and inthe shadow of Christ's Church, at three o'clock in the afternoon, I saw asight 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 parksof London Town, so that homeless men and women may not come in at nightand sleep upon it. 

As we entered the garden, an old woman, between fifty and sixty, passedus, striding with sturdy intention if somewhat rickety action, with twobulky bundles, covered with sacking, slung fore and aft upon her. Shewas a woman tramp, a houseless soul, too independent to drag her failingcarcass through the workhouse door. Like the snail, she carried her homewith 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 sidearrayed a mass of miserable and distorted humanity, the sight of whichwould have impelled Dore to more diabolical flights of fancy than he eversucceeded in achieving. It was a welter of rags and filth, of all mannerof 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 mostpart, or trying to sleep. Here were a dozen women, ranging in age fromtwenty years to seventy. Next a babe, possibly of nine months, lyingasleep, flat on the hard bench, with neither pillow nor covering, norwith any one looking after it. Next half-a-dozen men, sleeping boltupright or leaning against one another in their sleep. In one place afamily group, a child asleep in its sleeping mother's arms, and thehusband (or male mate) clumsily mending a dilapidated shoe. On anotherbench a woman trimming the frayed strips of her rags with a knife, andanother woman, with thread and needle, sewing up rents. Adjoining, a manholding a sleeping woman in his arms. Farther on, a man, his clothingcaked with gutter mud, asleep, with head in the lap of a woman, not morethan twenty-five years old, and also asleep. 

It was this sleeping that puzzled me. Why were nine out of ten of themasleep or trying to sleep? But it was not till afterwards that Ilearned. _It is a law of the powers that be that the homeless shall notsleep 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 wholerows of men lying asleep or drowsing, and all too deep sunk in torpor torouse 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 forthru'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 theworkhouse. I have made two attempts now, and I shall shortly make athird. The first time I started out at seven o'clock in the evening withfour shillings in my pocket. Herein I committed two errors. In thefirst place, the applicant for admission to the casual ward must bedestitute, and as he is subjected to a rigorous search, he must really bedestitute; and fourpence, much less four shillings, is sufficientaffluence to disqualify him. In the second place, I made the mistake oftardiness. Seven o'clock in the evening is too late in the day for apauper to get a pauper's bed. 

For the benefit of gently nurtured and innocent folk, let me explain whata 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 anavvy 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 burningyoung socialist and another friend, and all I had in my pocket wasthru'pence. They piloted me to the Whitechapel Workhouse, at which Ipeered from around a friendly corner. It was a few minutes past five inthe afternoon but already a long and melancholy line was formed, whichstrung 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 endof the day for a pauper's shelter from the night, and I confess it almostunnerved me. Like the boy before the dentist's door, I suddenlydiscovered a multitude of reasons for being elsewhere. Some hints of thestruggle going on within must have shown in my face, for one of mycompanions said, "Don't funk; you can do it. "

Of course I could do it, but I became aware that even thru'pence in mypocket was too lordly a treasure for such a throng; and, in order thatall 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. Woefulit 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 yearsof 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 versewas, you shall learn. 

"I won't stand it much longer, I won't, " he was complaining to the man onthe other side of him. "I'll smash a windy, a big 'un, an' get run infor fourteen days. Then I'll have a good place to sleep, never fear, an'better grub than you get here. Though I'd miss my bit of bacey"--this asan after-thought, and said regretfully and resignedly. 

"I've been out two nights now, " he went on; "wet to the skin night beforelast, an' I can't stand it much longer. I'm gettin' old, an' somemornin' they'll pick me up dead. "

He whirled with fierce passion on me: "Don't you ever let yourself growold, 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 getfor it. I wish I was dead, I wish I was dead. Can't come any too quickfor me, I tell you. "

The moisture rushed into his eyes, but, before the other man couldcomfort him, he began to hum a lilting sea song as though there was nosuch thing as heartbreak in the world. 

Given encouragement, this is the story he told while waiting in line atthe workhouse after two nights of exposure in the streets. 

As a boy he had enlisted in the British navy, and for two score years andmore served faithfully and well. Names, dates, commanders, ports, ships, engagements, and battles, rolled from his lips in a steady stream, but itis beyond me to remember them all, for it is not quite in keeping to takenotes at the poorhouse door. He had been through the "First War inChina, " as he termed it; had enlisted with the East India Company andserved 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 theCrimea; and all this in addition to having fought and toiled for theEnglish flag pretty well over the rest of the globe. 

Then the thing happened. A little thing, it could only be traced back tofirst 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; orthe commander had spoken brusquely to him. The point is, that on thisparticular 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, hadthree good-conduct stripes, and possessed the Victoria Cross fordistinguished service in battle; so he could not have been such analtogether bad sort of a sailorman. The lieutenant was irritable; thelieutenant called him a name--well, not a nice sort of name. It referredto his mother. When I was a boy it was our boys' code to fight likelittle demons should such an insult be given our mothers; and many menhave died in my part of the world for calling other men this name. 

However, the lieutenant called the sailor this name. At that moment itchanced the sailor had an iron lever or bar in his hands. He promptlystruck the lieutenant over the head with it, knocking him out of therigging and overboard. 

And then, in the man's own words: "I saw what I had done. I knew theRegulations, 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 usboth. An' I'd ha' done it, too, only the pinnace from the flagship wasjust 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 tosave him. "

Then came the court-martial, or whatever name a sea trial goes by. Herecited his sentence, word for word, as though memorised and gone over inbitterness many times. And here it is, for the sake of discipline andrespect to officers not always gentlemen, the punishment of a man who wasguilty of manhood. To be reduced to the rank of ordinary seaman; to bedebarred all prize-money due him; to forfeit all rights to pension; toresign the Victoria Cross; to be discharged from the navy with a goodcharacter (this being his first offence); to receive fifty lashes; and toserve two years in prison. 

"I wish I had drowned that day, I wish to God I had, " he concluded, asthe line moved up and we passed around the corner. 

At last the door came in sight, through which the paupers were beingadmitted in bunches. And here I learned a surprising thing: _this beingWednesday, none of us would be released till Friday morning_. Furthermore, and oh, you tobacco users, take heed: _we would not bepermitted to take in any tobacco_. This we would have to surrender as weentered. Sometimes, I was told, it was returned on leaving and sometimesit was destroyed. 

The old man-of-war's man gave me a lesson. Opening his pouch, he emptiedthe tobacco (a pitiful quantity) into a piece of paper. This, snugly andflatly wrapped, went down his sock inside his shoe. Down went my pieceof tobacco inside my sock, for forty hours without tobacco is a hardshipall tobacco users will understand. 

Again and again the line moved up, and we were slowly but surelyapproaching the wicket. At the moment we happened to be standing on aniron grating, and a man appearing underneath, the old sailor called downto 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 isnot a nice thing, hungry and penniless, to face a sleepless night in thestreets. But we hoped against hope, till, when ten stood outside thewicket, 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 speedingaway on the desperate chance of finding shelter elsewhere. I stood anddebated with two other men, wise in the knowledge of casual wards, as towhere we should go. They decided on the Poplar Workhouse, three milesaway, 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 formthen--pets, that's what they are. They let 'm in, the same ones, nightupon night. "

CHAPTER VIII--THE CARTER AND THE CARPENTER

The Carter, with his clean-cut face, chin beard, and shaved upper lip, Ishould have taken in the United States for anything from a master workmanto a well-to-do farmer. The Carpenter--well, I should have taken him fora 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 wasthat they were old, and that their children, instead of growing up totake care of them, had died. Their years had told on them, and they hadbeen forced out of the whirl of industry by the younger and strongercompetitors 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, theythought, but to chance it was all that remained to us. It was Poplar, orthe 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 theCarpenter, sixty-five years of age, had been out five nights. 

But, O dear, soft people, full of meat and blood, with white beds andairy rooms waiting you each night, how can I make you know what it is tosuffer as you would suffer if you spent a weary night on London'sstreets! Believe me, you would think a thousand centuries had come andgone before the east paled into dawn; you would shiver till you wereready to cry aloud with the pain of each aching muscle; and you wouldmarvel that you could endure so much and live. Should you rest upon abench, and your tired eyes close, depend upon it the policeman wouldrouse you and gruffly order you to "move on. " You may rest upon thebench, and benches are few and far between; but if rest means sleep, onyou must go, dragging your tired body through the endless streets. Shouldyou, in desperate slyness, seek some forlorn alley or dark passageway andlie down, the omnipresent policeman will rout you out just the same. Itis his business to rout you out. It is a law of the powers that be thatyou shall be routed out. 

But when the dawn came, the nightmare over, you would hale you home torefresh yourself, and until you died you would tell the story of youradventure to groups of admiring friends. It would grow into a mightystory. Your little eight-hour night would become an Odyssey and you aHomer. 

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 Townthis night. Please don't remember it as you go to bed; if you are assoft as you ought to be you may not rest so well as usual. But for oldmen of sixty, seventy, and eighty, ill-fed, with neither meat nor blood, to greet the dawn unrefreshed, and to stagger through the day in madsearch for crusts, with relentless night rushing down upon them again, and to do this five nights and days--O dear, soft people, full of meatand blood, how can you ever understand?

I walked up Mile End Road between the Carter and the Carpenter. Mile EndRoad is a wide thoroughfare, cutting the heart of East London, and therewere tens of thousands of people abroad on it. I tell you this so thatyou may fully appreciate what I shall describe in the next paragraph. AsI say, we walked along, and when they grew bitter and cursed the land, Icursed with them, cursed as an American waif would curse, stranded in astrange and terrible land. And, as I tried to lead them to believe, andsucceeded in making them believe, they took me for a "seafaring man, " whohad spent his money in riotous living, lost his clothes (no unusualoccurrence with seafaring men ashore), and was temporarily broke whilelooking for a ship. This accounted for my ignorance of English ways ingeneral and casual wards in particular, and my curiosity concerning thesame. 

The Carter was hard put to keep the pace at which we walked (he told methat he had eaten nothing that day), but the Carpenter, lean and hungry, his grey and ragged overcoat flapping mournfully in the breeze, swung onin a long and tireless stride which reminded me strongly of the plainswolf or coyote. Both kept their eyes upon the pavement as they walkedand talked, and every now and then one or the other would stoop and picksomething up, never missing the stride the while. I thought it was cigarand cigarette stumps they were collecting, and for some time took nonotice. Then I did notice. 

_From the slimy, spittle-drenched, sidewalk, they were picking up bits oforange peel, apple skin, and grape stems, and, they were eating them. Thepits of greengage plums they cracked between their teeth for the kernelsinside. They picked up stray bits of bread the size of peas, apple coresso black and dirty one would not take them to be apple cores, and thesethings these two men took into their mouths, and chewed them, andswallowed them; and this, between six and seven o'clock in the evening ofAugust 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 bloodyrevolution. They talked as anarchists, fanatics, and madmen would talk. And who shall blame them? In spite of my three good meals that day, andthe snug bed I could occupy if I wished, and my social philosophy, and myevolutionary belief in the slow development and metamorphosis ofthings--in spite of all this, I say, I felt impelled to talk rot withthem or hold my tongue. Poor fools! Not of their sort are revolutionsbred. And when they are dead and dust, which will be shortly, otherfools 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 Carpenterexplained things to me and advised me. Their advice, by the way, wasbrief, and to the point; it was to get out of the country. "As fast asGod'll let me, " I assured them; "I'll hit only the high places, till youwon't be able to see my trail for smoke. " They felt the force of myfigures, rather than understood them, and they nodded their headsapprovingly. 

"Actually make a man a criminal against 'is will, " said the Carpenter. "'Ere I am, old, younger men takin' my place, my clothes gettin' shabbieran' shabbier, an' makin' it 'arder every day to get a job. I go to thecasual ward for a bed. Must be there by two or three in the afternoon orI won't get in. You saw what happened to-day. What chance does thatgive me to look for work? S'pose I do get into the casual ward? Keep mein all day to-morrow, let me out mornin' o' next day. What then? Thelaw sez I can't get in another casual ward that night less'n ten milesdistant. Have to hurry an' walk to be there in time that day. Whatchance does that give me to look for a job? S'pose I don't walk. S'poseI look for a job? In no time there's night come, an' no bed. No sleepall night, nothin' to eat, what shape am I in the mornin' to look forwork? Got to make up my sleep in the park somehow" (the vision ofChrist's Church, Spitalfield, was strong on me) "an' get something toeat. 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'vepaid 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. Mylegs is hurtin' me something fearful. "

"The roll you get in the 'spike' is that 'ard you can't eat it nicelywith 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'sa cant word, you know. "

But what surprised me was that he should have the word "cant" in hisvocabulary, 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 succeededin getting into the Poplar Workhouse, and between them I was suppliedwith much information. Having taken a cold bath on entering, I would begiven for supper six ounces of bread and "three parts of skilly. " "Threeparts" means three-quarters of a pint, and "skilly" is a fluid concoctionof three quarts of oatmeal stirred into three buckets and a half of hotwater. 

"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'dnot get any spoon. 'Old 'er up an' let 'er run down, that's 'ow they doit. "

"You do get good skilly at 'Ackney, " said the Carter. 

"Oh, wonderful skilly, that, " praised the Carpenter, and each lookedeloquently 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 halfafter five in the mornin', an' you get up an' take a 'sluice'--if there'sany soap. Then breakfast, same as supper, three parts o' skilly an' asix-ounce loaf. "

"'Tisn't always six ounces, " corrected the Carter. 

"'Tisn't, no; an' often that sour you can 'ardly eat it. When first Istarted I couldn't eat the skilly nor the bread, but now I can eat my ownan' 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 tobreak 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 cellto pick oakum. It's too much like prison. "

"But suppose, after you've had your night's sleep, you refuse to pickoakum, 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 theCarpenter. "Wouldn't advise you to try it on, my lad. "

"Then comes dinner, " he went on. "Eight ounces of bread, one and a arfounces of cheese, an' cold water. Then you finish your task an' 'avesupper, same as before, three parts o' skilly any six ounces o' bread. Then to bed, six o'clock, an' next mornin' you're turned loose, providedyou've finished your task. "

We had long since left Mile End Road, and after traversing a gloomy mazeof narrow, winding streets, we came to Poplar Workhouse. On a low stonewall we spread our handkerchiefs, and each in his handkerchief put allhis worldly possessions, with the exception of the "bit o' baccy" downhis sock. And then, as the last light was fading from the drab-colouredsky, the wind blowing cheerless and cold, we stood, with our pitifullittle bundles in our hands, a forlorn group at the workhouse door. 

Three working girls came along, and one looked pityingly at me; as shepassed I followed her with my eyes, and she still looked pityingly backat 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 menwho stood by my side! She was a young woman, and I was a young man, andwhat vague sex promptings impelled her to pity me put her sentiment onthe lowest plane. Pity for old men is an altruistic feeling, andbesides, the workhouse door is the accustomed place for old men. So sheshowed no pity for them, only for me, who deserved it least or not atall. 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 handleand 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 imperilledtheir chance for a bed and three parts of skilly. Nobody came. Luckilyit 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, whocommonly draws a yearly salary of from seven to nine pounds, is a veryfinicky and important personage, and cannot be treated too fastidiouslyby--paupers. 

So we waited, ten times a decent interval, when the Carter stealthilyadvanced a timid forefinger to the button, and gave it the faintest, shortest possible push. I have looked at waiting men where life or deathwas in the issue; but anxious suspense showed less plainly on their facesthan it showed on the faces of these two men as they waited on the comingof 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 theCarter 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. Possiblyhe took me for a latter-day Jack-the-Ripper, with a penchant for elderlymale paupers. Or he may have thought I was inveigling him into thecommission of some desperate crime. Anyway, he was frightened. 

It will be remembered, at the outset, that I sewed a pound inside mystoker's singlet under the armpit. This was my emergency fund, and I wasnow called upon to use it for the first time. 

Not until I had gone through the acts of a contortionist, and shown theround coin sewed in, did I succeed in getting the Carter's help. Eventhen his hand was trembling so that I was afraid he would cut me insteadof the stitches, and I was forced to take the knife away and do itmyself. Out rolled the gold piece, a fortune in their hungry eyes; andaway we stampeded for the nearest coffee-house. 

Of course I had to explain to them that I was merely an investigator, asocial student, seeking to find out how the other half lived. And atonce they shut up like clams. I was not of their kind; my speech hadchanged, the tones of my voice were different, in short, I was asuperior, 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 byme into the coffee-house. They had seen my gold piece, and they couldunderstand 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 cupof 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 attitudetoward the poorhouse porter. But I wouldn't have it. Step by step Iincreased their order--eggs, rashers of bacon, more eggs, more bacon, more tea, more slices and so forth--they denying wistfully all the whilethat they cared for anything more, and devouring it ravenously as fast asit 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. Itresembled 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 hadon them. At first they were melancholy, and talked of the divers timesthey had contemplated suicide. The Carter, not a week before, had stoodon 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 toget hold of a revolver? That was the rub. 

They grew more cheerful as the hot "tea" soaked in, and talked more aboutthemselves. The Carter had buried his wife and children, with theexception of one son, who grew to manhood and helped him in his littlebusiness. Then the thing happened. The son, a man of thirty-one, diedof the smallpox. No sooner was this over than the father came down withfever 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, hislittle business gone glimmering, and not a farthing. The thing hadhappened, 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 theywere putting up the stands for the first Coronation parade. "An' I gotfair sick of the answer: 'No! no! no!' It rang in my ears at night whenI tried to sleep, always the same, 'No! no! no!'" Only the past week hehad 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 servedtwenty-two years. Likewise, his two brothers had gone into the army;one, troop sergeant-major of the Seventh Hussars, dying in India afterthe Mutiny; the other, after nine years under Roberts in the East, hadbeen lost in Egypt. The Carpenter had not gone into the army, so here hewas, 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, actuallywastin' 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 likeparchment over the bones, and the sensation produced was for all theworld like running one's hand over a washboard. 

"Seven years o' bliss I 'ad, " he said. "A good missus and three bonnielassies. But they all died. Scarlet fever took the girls inside afortnight. "

"After this, sir, " said the Carter, indicating the spread, and desiringto turn the conversation into more cheerful channels; "after this, Iwouldn't be able to eat a workhouse breakfast in the morning. "

"Nor I, " agreed the Carpenter, and they fell to discussing belly delightsand 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 mymind to win the horse or lose the saddle. You know what I mean, sir--tocommit some big robbery. But when mornin' come, there was I, too weakfrom 'unger an' cold to 'arm a mouse. "

As their poor vitals warmed to the food, they began to expand and waxboastful, and to talk politics. I can only say that they talked politicsas well as the average middle-class man, and a great deal better thansome of the middle-class men I have heard. What surprised me was thehold they had on the world, its geography and peoples, and on recent andcontemporaneous history. As I say, they were not fools, these two men. They were merely old, and their children had undutifully failed to growup and give them a place by the fire. 

One last incident, as I bade them good-bye on the corner, happy with acouple of shillings in their pockets and the certain prospect of a bedfor the night. Lighting a cigarette, I was about to throw away theburning 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 thecigarette I had given him, the Carpenter hurried with the filling of hispipe 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 hadrun my hand. 

CHAPTER IX--THE SPIKE

First of all, I must beg forgiveness of my body for the vileness throughwhich I have dragged it, and forgiveness of my stomach for the vilenesswhich I have thrust into it. I have been to the spike, and slept in thespike, and eaten in the spike; also, I have run away from the spike. 

After my two unsuccessful attempts to penetrate the Whitechapel casualward, I started early, and joined the desolate line before three o'clockin the afternoon. They did not "let in" till six, but at that early hourI was number twenty, while the news had gone forth that only twenty-twowere to be admitted. By four o'clock there were thirty-four in line, thelast ten hanging on in the slender hope of getting in by some kind of amiracle. Many more came, looked at the line, and went away, wise to thebitter fact that the spike would be "full up. "

Conversation was slack at first, standing there, till the man on one sideof me and the man on the other side of me discovered that they had beenin the smallpox hospital at the same time, though a full house of sixteenhundred patients had prevented their becoming acquainted. But they madeup for it, discussing and comparing the more loathsome features of theirdisease in the most cold-blooded, matter-of-fact way. I learned that theaverage mortality was one in six, that one of them had been in threemonths 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 askedthem how long they had been out. One had been out two weeks, and theother three weeks. Their faces were badly pitted (though each assuredthe other that this was not so), and further, they showed me in theirhands 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, rightout of his flesh into the air. I tried to shrink up smaller inside myclothes, and I registered a fervent though silent hope that it had notpopped 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 whensmitten by the disease, and both had emerged from the hospital "broke, "with the gloomy task before them of hunting for work. So far, they hadnot found any, and they had come to the spike for a "rest up" after threedays and nights on the street. 

It seems that not only the man who becomes old is punished for hisinvoluntary misfortune, but likewise the man who is struck by disease oraccident. Later on, I talked with another man--"Ginger" we calledhim--who stood at the head of the line--a sure indication that he hadbeen waiting since one o'clock. A year before, one day, while in theemploy of a fish dealer, he was carrying a heavy box of fish which wastoo much for him. Result: "something broke, " and there was the box onthe ground, and he on the ground beside it. 

At the first hospital, whither he was immediately carried, they said itwas 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 thestreets 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 pointis, the employer did nothing, positively nothing, for the man injured inhis employment, and even refused him "a light job now and again, " when hecame out. As far as Ginger is concerned, he is a broken man. His onlychance to earn a living was by heavy work. He is now incapable ofperforming 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 andshelter. The thing happened--that is all. He put his back under toogreat a load of fish, and his chance for happiness in life was crossedoff the books. 

Several men in the line had been to the United States, and they werewishing that they had remained there, and were cursing themselves fortheir folly in ever having left. England had become a prison to them, aprison from which there was no hope of escape. It was impossible forthem to get away. They could neither scrape together the passage money, nor get a chance to work their passage. The country was too overrun bypoor devils on that "lay. "

I was on the seafaring-man-who-had-lost-his-clothes-and-money tack, andthey 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 thespike. There was nothing good in it for me. To head for the coast andbend every effort to get away on a ship. To go to work, if possible, andscrape together a pound or so, with which I might bribe some steward orunderling to give me chance to work my passage. They envied me my youthand strength, which would sooner or later get me out of the country. These they no longer possessed. Age and English hardship had brokenthem, and for them the game was played and up. 

There was one, however, who was still young, and who, I am sure, will inthe 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 ofwork was twelve hours. He had saved his money, grown too prosperous, andreturned to the mother-country. Now he was standing in line at thespike. 

For the past two years, he told me, he had been working as a cook. Hishours had been from 7 a. M. To 10. 30 p. M. , and on Saturday to 12. 30p. M. --ninety-five hours per week, for which he had received twentyshillings, or five dollars. 

"But the work and the long hours was killing me, " he said, "and I had tochuck the job. I had a little money saved, but I spent it living andlooking for another place. "

This was his first night in the spike, and he had come in only to getrested. 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 aship 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 manyways very human. I remember a carter, evidently returning home after theday's work, stopping his cart before us so that his young hopeful, whohad run to meet him, could climb in. But the cart was big, the younghopeful little, and he failed in his several attempts to swarm up. Whereupon one of the most degraded-looking men stepped out of the lineand hoisted him in. Now the virtue and the joy of this act lies in thatit was service of love, not hire. The carter was poor, and the man knewit; 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, evenas you and I would have done and thanked. 

Another beautiful touch was that displayed by the "Hopper" and his "olewoman. " He had been in line about half-an-hour when the "ole woman" (hismate) 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. Asshe talked to him, he reached forward, caught the one stray wisp of thewhite hair that was flying wild, deftly twirled it between his fingers, and tucked it back properly behind her ear. From all of which one mayconclude many things. He certainly liked her well enough to wish her tobe 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 otherunfortunates who stood in the spike line. But last and best, andunderlying all these motives, it was a sturdy affection he bore her; forman is not prone to bother his head over neatness and tidiness in a womanfor 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 Iknew from their talk, should have to seek a pauper lodging. He hadpride, pride in his old woman and pride in himself. When I asked himwhat he thought I, a greenhorn, might expect to earn at "hopping, " hesized me up, and said that it all depended. Plenty of people were tooslow to pick hops and made a failure of it. A man, to succeed, must usehis head and be quick with his fingers, must be exceeding quick with hisfingers. Now he and his old woman could do very well at it, working theone bin between them and not going to sleep over it; but then, they hadbeen at it for years. 

"I 'ad a mate as went down last year, " spoke up a man. "It was 'is fusttime, but 'e come back wi' two poun' ten in 'is pockit, an' 'e was onlygone 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 withoutblankets and living the Lord knows how. There are moments when I amthankful that I was not "jest nat'rally born" a genius for anything, noteven hop-picking, In the matter of getting an outfit for "the hops, " the Hopper gave mesome sterling advice, to which same give heed, you soft and tenderpeople, 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 breadand 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 workas is work. Cawn't do it on cold wittles. Tell you wot you do, lad. Runaround 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 olewoman got ours that way. " (He pointed at the bundle she held, while shenodded proudly, beaming on me with good-nature and consciousness ofsuccess and prosperity. ) "This overcoat is as good as a blanket, " hewent 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 certaintythat 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 onlything 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 whilethey enjoyed the quick work with the fingers, "paddin' the 'oof, " whichis walking, was beginning to bear heavily upon them. And I looked attheir grey hairs, and ahead into the future ten years, and wondered howit would be with them. 

I noticed another man and his old woman join the line, both of them pastfifty. 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 totramp the streets all night. 

The street on which we stood, from wall to wall, was barely twenty feetwide. The sidewalks were three feet wide. It was a residence street. Atleast workmen and their families existed in some sort of fashion in thehouses across from us. And each day and every day, from one in theafternoon till six, our ragged spike line is the principal feature of theview commanded by their front doors and windows. One workman sat in hisdoor directly opposite us, taking his rest and a breath of air after thetoil of the day. His wife came to chat with him. The doorway was toosmall for two, so she stood up. Their babes sprawled before them. Andhere was the spike line, less than a score of feet away--neither privacyfor the workman, nor privacy for the pauper. About our feet played thechildren of the neighbourhood. To them our presence was nothing unusual. We were not an intrusion. We were as natural and ordinary as the brickwalls and stone curbs of their environment. They had been born to thesight 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 ofthree. Name, age, occupation, place of birth, condition of destitution, and the previous night's "doss, " were taken with lightning-like rapidityby the superintendent; and as I turned I was startled by a man'sthrusting into my hand something that felt like a brick, and shoutinginto my ear, "any knives, matches, or tobacco?" "No, sir, " I lied, aslied every man who entered. As I passed downstairs to the cellar, Ilooked at the brick in my hand, and saw that by doing violence to thelanguage it might be called "bread. " By its weight and hardness itcertainly must have been unleavened. 

The light was very dim down in the cellar, and before I knew it someother man had thrust a pannikin into my other hand. Then I stumbled onto a still darker room, where were benches and tables and men. The placesmelled vilely, and the sombre gloom, and the mumble of voices from outof the obscurity, made it seem more like some anteroom to the infernalregions. 

Most of the men were suffering from tired feet, and they prefaced themeal by removing their shoes and unbinding the filthy rags with whichtheir feet were wrapped. This added to the general noisomeness, while ittook away from my appetite. 

In fact, I found that I had made a mistake. I had eaten a hearty dinnerfive hours before, and to have done justice to the fare before me Ishould have fasted for a couple of days. The pannikin contained skilly, three-quarters of a pint, a mixture of Indian corn and hot water. Themen were dipping their bread into heaps of salt scattered over the dirtytables. 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 toeat the bread nicely. "

I went over into a dark corner where I had observed other men going andfound the water. Then I returned and attacked the skilly. It was coarseof texture, unseasoned, gross, and bitter. This bitterness whichlingered persistently in the mouth after the skilly had passed on, Ifound especially repulsive. I struggled manfully, but was mastered by myqualms, and half-a-dozen mouthfuls of skilly and bread was the measure ofmy 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 spikegoin'. Y'oughto see some of them. Search you to the skin. "

The pannikins scraped clean, conversation began to spring up. "Thissuper'tendent 'ere is always writin' to the papers 'bout us mugs, " saidthe 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'twork. 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 wastellin' '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 thecrust 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 somewhereover in the deeper darkness came another voice, orating angrily:

"Talk o' the country bein' good for tommy [food]; I'd like to see it. Ijest 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 livebloomin' 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 astalks about 'ow much they can get, w'en they're in the spike can eat myshare o' skilly as well as their bleedin' own. "

"There's chaps in London, " said a man across the table from me, "that getall 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 benopenin' cabs an' sellin' papers since the day they was born, an' theirfathers an' mothers before 'em. It's all in the trainin', I say, an' thelikes of me an' you 'ud starve at it. "

This also was verified by the general chorus, and likewise the statementthat 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 wascruel. T'other two said they'd be blessed if they do it, an' theydidn't; but I kept wearin' into mine to warm up, you know. An' then theguardians come, an' t'other chaps got run in for fourteen days, an' theguardians, w'en they see wot I'd been doin', gives me a tanner each, fiveo' them, an' turns me up. "

The majority of these men, nay, all of them, I found, do not like thespike, and only come to it when driven in. After the "rest up" they aregood for two or three days and nights on the streets, when they aredriven in again for another rest. Of course, this continuous hardshipquickly breaks their constitutions, and they realise it, though only in avague way; while it is so much the common run of things that they do notworry about it. 

"On the doss, " they call vagabondage here, which corresponds to "on theroad" in the United States. The agreement is that kipping, or dossing, or sleeping, is the hardest problem they have to face, harder even thanthat of food. The inclement weather and the harsh laws are mainlyresponsible for this, while the men themselves ascribe their homelessnessto foreign immigration, especially of Polish and Russian Jews, who taketheir places at lower wages and establish the sweating system. 

By seven o'clock we were called away to bathe and go to bed. We strippedour clothes, wrapping them up in our coats and buckling our belts aboutthem, and deposited them in a heaped rack and on the floor--a beautifulscheme for the spread of vermin. Then, two by two, we entered thebathroom. There were two ordinary tubs, and this I know: the two menpreceding had washed in that water, we washed in the same water, and itwas not changed for the two men that followed us. This I know; but I amalso 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 liquidat myself, while I hastily brushed it off with a towel wet from thebodies of other men. My equanimity was not restored by seeing the backof one poor wretch a mass of blood from attacks of vermin and retaliatoryscratching. 

A shirt was handed me--which I could not help but wonder how many othermen had worn; and with a couple of blankets under my arm I trudged off tothe sleeping apartment. This was a long, narrow room, traversed by twolow iron rails. Between these rails were stretched, not hammocks, butpieces of canvas, six feet long and less than two feet wide. These werethe beds, and they were six inches apart and about eight inches above thefloor. The chief difficulty was that the head was somewhat higher thanthe feet, which caused the body constantly to slip down. Being slung tothe same rails, when one man moved, no matter how slightly, the rest wereset rocking; and whenever I dozed somebody was sure to struggle back tothe position from which he had slipped, and arouse me again. 

Many hours passed before I won to sleep. It was only seven in theevening, and the voices of children, in shrill outcry, playing in thestreet, continued till nearly midnight. The smell was frightful andsickening, while my imagination broke loose, and my skin crept andcrawled till I was nearly frantic. Grunting, groaning, and snoring aroselike the sounds emitted by some sea monster, and several times, afflictedby nightmare, one or another, by his shrieks and yells, aroused the lotof us. Toward morning I was awakened by a rat or some similar animal onmy breast. In the quick transition from sleep to waking, before I wascompletely myself, I raised a shout to wake the dead. At any rate, Iwoke 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, whichI gave away, and we were told off to our various tasks. Some were set toscrubbing and cleaning, others to picking oakum, and eight of us wereconvoyed across the street to the Whitechapel Infirmary where we were setat scavenger work. This was the method by which we paid for our skillyand canvas, and I, for one, know that I paid in full many times over. 

Though we had most revolting tasks to perform, our allotment wasconsidered the best and the other men deemed themselves lucky in beingchosen to perform it. 

"Don't touch it, mate, the nurse sez it's deadly, " warned my workingpartner, 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 totouch it, nor to allow it to touch me. Nevertheless, I had to carry thesack, and other sacks, down five flights of stairs and empty them in areceptacle where the corruption was speedily sprinkled with strongdisinfectant. 

Perhaps there is a wise mercy in all this. These men of the spike, thepeg, and the street, are encumbrances. They are of no good or use to anyone, nor to themselves. They clutter the earth with their presence, andare better out of the way. Broken by hardship, ill fed, and worsenourished, they are always the first to be struck down by disease, asthey are likewise the quickest to die. 

They feel, themselves, that the forces of society tend to hurl them outof existence. We were sprinkling disinfectant by the mortuary, when thedead waggon drove up and five bodies were packed into it. Theconversation turned to the "white potion" and "black jack, " and I foundthey were all agreed that the poor person, man or woman, who in theInfirmary 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 doesnot matter in the least whether this be actually so or not. The pointis, they have the feeling that it is so, and they have created thelanguage 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, wheretea was brought to us, and the hospital scraps. These were heaped highon a huge platter in an indescribable mess--pieces of bread, chunks ofgrease 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 sickones suffering from all manner of diseases. Into this mess the menplunged 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 theirhandkerchiefs and thrust it inside their shirts. 

"Once, w'en I was 'ere before, wot did I find out there but a 'ole lot ofpork-ribs, " said Ginger to me. By "out there" he meant the place wherethe corruption was dumped and sprinkled with strong disinfectant. "Theywas 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' 'emto. Couldn't see a soul, an' I was runnin' 'round clean crazy, the blokerunnin' 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 'erapron. "

O Charity, O Philanthropy, descend to the spike and take a lesson fromGinger. At the bottom of the Abyss he performed as purely an altruisticact as was ever performed outside the Abyss. It was fine of Ginger, andif the old woman caught some contagion from the "no end o' meat" on thepork-ribs, it was still fine, though not so fine. But the most salientthing in this incident, it seems to me, is poor Ginger, "clean crazy" atsight of so much food going to waste. 

It is the rule of the casual ward that a man who enters must stay twonights and a day; but I had seen sufficient for my purpose, had paid formy 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 theopen 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'skip 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 hourfrom my escape, in a Turkish bath, I was sweating out whatever germs andother things had penetrated my epidermis, and wishing that I could standa temperature of three hundred and twenty rather than two hundred andtwenty. 

CHAPTER X--CARRYING THE BANNER

"To carry the banner" means to walk the streets all night; and I, withthe figurative emblem hoisted, went out to see what I could see. Men andwomen walk the streets at night all over this great city, but I selectedthe West End, making Leicester Square my base, and scouting about fromthe Thames Embankment to Hyde Park. 

The rain was falling heavily when the theatres let out, and the brilliantthrong which poured from the places of amusement was hard put to findcabs. The streets were so many wild rivers of cabs, most of which wereengaged, however; and here I saw the desperate attempts of ragged men andboys to get a shelter from the night by procuring cabs for the cablessladies and gentlemen. I use the word "desperate" advisedly, for thesewretched, homeless ones were gambling a soaking against a bed; and mostof them, I took notice, got the soaking and missed the bed. Now, to gothrough a stormy night with wet clothes, and, in addition, to be illnourished and not to have tasted meat for a week or a month, is about assevere a hardship as a man can undergo. Well fed and well clad, I havetravelled all day with the spirit thermometer down to seventy-fourdegrees below zero--one hundred and six degrees of frost {1}; and thoughI suffered, it was a mere nothing compared with carrying the banner for anight, ill fed, ill clad, and soaking wet. 

The streets grew very quiet and lonely after the theatre crowd had gonehome. Only were to be seen the ubiquitous policemen, flashing their darklanterns into doorways and alleys, and men and women and boys takingshelter in the lee of buildings from the wind and rain. Piccadilly, however, was not quite so deserted. Its pavements were brightened bywell-dressed women without escort, and there was more life and actionthere than elsewhere, due to the process of finding escort. But by threeo'clock the last of them had vanished, and it was then indeed lonely. 

At half-past one the steady downpour ceased, and only showers fellthereafter. The homeless folk came away from the protection of thebuildings, and slouched up and down and everywhere, in order to rush upthe circulation and keep warm. 

One old woman, between fifty and sixty, a sheer wreck, I had noticedearlier in the night standing in Piccadilly, not far from LeicesterSquare. She seemed to have neither the sense nor the strength to get outof the rain or keep walking, but stood stupidly, whenever she got thechance, meditating on past days, I imagine, when life was young and bloodwas warm. But she did not get the chance often. She was moved on byevery policeman, and it required an average of six moves to send herdoddering off one man's beat and on to another's. By three o'clock, shehad progressed as far as St. James Street, and as the clocks werestriking four I saw her sleeping soundly against the iron railings ofGreen Park. A brisk shower was falling at the time, and she must havebeen drenched to the skin. 

Now, said I, at one o'clock, to myself; consider that you are a pooryoung man, penniless, in London Town, and that to-morrow you must lookfor work. It is necessary, therefore, that you get some sleep in orderthat you may have strength to look for work and to do work in case youfind it. 

So I sat down on the stone steps of a building. Five minutes later apoliceman was looking at me. My eyes were wide open, so he only gruntedand 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 Idozed, 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 hadbeen out to the colonies and wished he were out to them again), when Inoticed an open passage leading under a building and disappearing indarkness. 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 fora sleep. The bobbies couldn't find us there. "

"No fear, " he answered. "There's the park guardians, and they'd run youin for six months. "

Times have changed, alas! When I was a youngster I used to read ofhomeless boys sleeping in doorways. Already the thing has become atradition. As a stock situation it will doubtless linger in literaturefor a century to come, but as a cold fact it has ceased to be. Here arethe doorways, and here are the boys, but happy conjunctions are no longereffected. The doorways remain empty, and the boys keep awake and carrythe banner. 

"I was down under the arches, " grumbled another young fellow. By"arches" he meant the shore arches where begin the bridges that span theThames. "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, 'ThinkI want ter pinch [steal] the bleedin' bridge?'"

Among those who carry the banner, Green Park has the reputation ofopening its gates earlier than the other parks, and at quarter-past fourin the morning, I, and many more, entered Green Park. It was rainingagain, but they were worn out with the night's walking, and they weredown on the benches and asleep at once. Many of the men stretched outfull length on the dripping wet grass, and, with the rain fallingsteadily 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 tocriticise the ridiculousness of their decrees. All night long they makethe homeless ones walk up and down. They drive them out of doors andpassages, and lock them out of the parks. The evident intention of allthis is to deprive them of sleep. Well and good, the powers have thepower to deprive them of sleep, or of anything else for that matter; butwhy under the sun do they open the gates of the parks at five o'clock inthe morning and let the homeless ones go inside and sleep? If it istheir intention to deprive them of sleep, why do they let them sleepafter five in the morning? And if it is not their intention to deprivethem 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 wretchesasleep in the grass. It was Sunday afternoon, the sun was fitfullyappearing, and the well-dressed West Enders, with their wives andprogeny, were out by thousands, taking the air. It was not a pleasantsight for them, those horrible, unkempt, sleeping vagabonds; while thevagabonds themselves, I know, would rather have done their sleeping thenight before. 

And so, dear soft people, should you ever visit London Town, and seethese men asleep on the benches and in the grass, please do not thinkthey are lazy creatures, preferring sleep to work. Know that the powersthat be have kept them walking all the night long, and that in the daythey have nowhere else to sleep. 

CHAPTER XI--THE PEG

But, after carrying the banner all night, I did not sleep in Green Parkwhen morning dawned. I was wet to the skin, it is true, and I had had nosleep for twenty-four hours; but, still adventuring as a penniless manlooking for work, I had to look about me, first for a breakfast, and nextfor the work. 

During the night I had heard of a place over on the Surrey side of theThames, where the Salvation Army every Sunday morning gave away abreakfast to the unwashed. (And, by the way, the men who carry thebanner are unwashed in the morning, and unless it is raining they do nothave much show for a wash, either. ) This, thought I, is the verything--breakfast in the morning, and then the whole day in which to lookfor 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 theWaterloo Bridge to the Surrey side, cut across to Blackfriars Road, coming out near the Surrey Theatre, and arrived at the Salvation Armybarracks before seven o'clock. This was "the peg. " And by "the peg, " inthe 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 inthe rain. Such prodigious misery! and so much of it! Old men, youngmen, all manner of men, and boys to boot, and all manner of boys. Somewere drowsing standing up; half a score of them were stretched out on thestone steps in most painful postures, all of them sound asleep, the skinof 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 headsbent forward on their knees. And, it must be remembered, these are nothard times in England. Things are going on very much as they ordinarilydo, 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 andscattered them to the four winds of Surrey. But when he encountered thecrowd asleep on the steps he was astounded. "Shocking!" he exclaimed. "Shocking! And of a Sunday morning! A pretty sight! Eigh! eigh! Getouta that, you bleeding nuisances!"

Of course it was a shocking sight, I was shocked myself. And I shouldnot care to have my own daughter pollute her eyes with such a sight, orcome 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 honeyjar. For was there not that wonderful thing, a breakfast, awaiting us?We could not have clustered more persistently and desperately had theybeen giving away million-dollar bank-notes. Some were already off tosleep, when back came the policeman and away we scattered only to returnagain as soon as the coast was clear. 

At half-past seven a little door opened, and a Salvation Army soldierstuck out his head. "Ayn't no sense blockin' the wy up that wy, " hesaid. "Those as 'as tickets cawn come hin now, an' those as 'asn'tcawn't come hin till nine. "

Oh, that breakfast! Nine o'clock! An hour and a half longer! The menwho held tickets were greatly envied. They were permitted to go inside, have a wash, and sit down and rest until breakfast, while we waited forthe same breakfast on the street. The tickets had been distributed theprevious night on the streets and along the Embankment, and thepossession of them was not a matter of merit, but of chance. 

At eight-thirty, more men with tickets were admitted, and by nine thelittle gate was opened to us. We crushed through somehow, and foundourselves packed in a courtyard like sardines. On more occasions thanone, as a Yankee tramp in Yankeeland, I have had to work for mybreakfast; 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 Iwaited in this packed courtyard. I had had nothing to eat all night, andI was weak and faint, while the smell of the soiled clothes and unwashedbodies, steaming from pent animal heat, and blocked solidly about me, nearly turned my stomach. So tightly were we packed, that a number ofthe men took advantage of the opportunity and went soundly asleepstanding up. 

Now, about the Salvation Army in general I know nothing, and whatevercriticism I shall make here is of that particular portion of theSalvation Army which does business on Blackfriars Road near the SurreyTheatre. In the first place, this forcing of men who have been up allnight to stand on their feet for hours longer, is as cruel as it isneedless. We were weak, famished, and exhausted from our night'shardship 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 manin four was looking for a ship, and I found at least a dozen of them tobe American sailors. In accounting for their being "on the beach, " Ireceived the same story from each and all, and from my knowledge of seaaffairs this story rang true. English ships sign their sailors for thevoyage, which means the round trip, sometimes lasting as long as threeyears; and they cannot sign off and receive their discharges until theyreach the home port, which is England. Their wages are low, their foodis bad, and their treatment worse. Very often they are really forced bytheir captains to desert in the New World or the colonies, leaving ahandsome sum of wages behind them--a distinct gain, either to the captainor the owners, or to both. But whether for this reason alone or not, itis 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 menare engaged at the somewhat higher wages that obtain in other portions ofthe world, under the agreement that they shall sign off on reachingEngland. The reason for this is obvious; for it would be poor businesspolicy to sign them for any longer time, since seamen's wages are low inEngland, and England is always crowded with sailormen on the beach. Sothis fully accounted for the American seamen at the Salvation Armybarracks. To get off the beach in other outlandish places they had cometo 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 chiefcharacteristic and which seems never to desert them, withal they werecursing the country with lurid metaphors quite refreshing after a monthof unimaginative, monotonous Cockney swearing. The Cockney has one oath, and one oath only, the most indecent in the language, which he uses onany and every occasion. Far different is the luminous and varied Westernswearing, which runs to blasphemy rather than indecency. And after all, since men will swear, I think I prefer blasphemy to indecency; there isan audacity about it, an adventurousness and defiance that is better thansheer filthiness. 

There was one American tramp royal whom I found particularly enjoyable. Ifirst noticed him on the street, asleep in a doorway, his head on hisknees, but a hat on his head that one does not meet this side of theWestern Ocean. When the policeman routed him out, he got up slowly anddeliberately, looked at the policeman, yawned and stretched himself, looked at the policeman again as much as to say he didn't know whether hewould or wouldn't, and then sauntered leisurely down the sidewalk. Atthe outset I was sure of the hat, but this made me sure of the wearer ofthe hat. 

In the jam inside I found myself alongside of him, and we had quite achat. He had been through Spain, Italy, Switzerland, and France, and hadaccomplished the practically impossible feat of beating his way threehundred 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 wasgetting 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 wascoming over soon, and a man who could drive eight horses was sure of ajob any time. These mugs over here didn't know beans about drivinganything more than a span. What was the matter with me hanging on andwaiting for Buffalo Bill? He was sure I could ring in somehow. 

And so, after all, blood is thicker than water. We werefellow-countrymen and strangers in a strange land. I had warmed to hisbattered old hat at sight of it, and he was as solicitous for my welfareas if we were blood brothers. We swapped all manner of usefulinformation concerning the country and the ways of its people, methods bywhich to obtain food and shelter and what not, and we parted genuinelysorry at having to say good-bye. 

One thing particularly conspicuous in this crowd was the shortness ofstature. I, who am but of medium height, looked over the heads of nineout 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 waythings are I'll be back at it before long. "

For an hour we stood quietly in this packed courtyard. Then the menbegan to grow restless. There was pushing and shoving forward, and amild hubbub of voices. Nothing rough, however, nor violent; merely therestlessness of weary and hungry men. At this juncture forth came theadjutant. I did not like him. His eyes were not good. There wasnothing of the lowly Galilean about him, but a great deal of thecenturion who said: "For I am a man in authority, having soldiers underme; and I say to this man, Go, and he goeth; and to another, Come, and hecometh; 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 saidthis. He seemed to me to revel in that he was a man in authority, ableto say to half a thousand ragged wretches, "you may eat or go hungry, asI elect. "

To deny us our breakfast after standing for hours! It was an awfulthreat, and the pitiful, abject silence which instantly fell attested itsawfulness. And it was a cowardly threat. We could not strike back, forwe were starving; and it is the way of the world that when one man feedsanother he is that man's master. But the centurion--I mean theadjutant--was not satisfied. In the dead silence he raised his voiceagain, 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 nearlyseven 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 suffersin many guises this side of the infernal regions. The adjutant made theprayer, but I did not take note of it, being too engrossed with themassed picture of misery before me. But the speech ran something likethis: "You will feast in Paradise. No matter how you starve and sufferhere, you will feast in Paradise, that is, if you will follow thedirections. " And so forth and so forth. A clever bit of propaganda, Itook it, but rendered of no avail for two reasons. First, the men whoreceived it were unimaginative and materialistic, unaware of theexistence of any Unseen, and too inured to hell on earth to be frightenedby hell to come. And second, weary and exhausted from the night'ssleeplessness and hardship, suffering from the long wait upon their feet, and faint from hunger, they were yearning, not for salvation, but forgrub. The "soul-snatchers" (as these men call all religiouspropagandists), should study the physiological basis of psychology alittle, 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 Iam sure that no man there had all he wanted, or half of what he wanted orneeded. I gave part of my bread to the tramp royal who was waiting forBuffalo Bill, and he was as ravenous at the end as he was in thebeginning. This is the breakfast: two slices of bread, one small pieceof bread with raisins in it and called "cake, " a wafer of cheese, and amug of "water bewitched. " Numbers of the men had been waiting since fiveo'clock for it, while all of us had waited at least four hours; and inaddition, we had been herded like swine, packed like sardines, andtreated like curs, and been preached at, and sung to, and prayed for. Norwas that all. 

No sooner was breakfast over (and it was over almost as quickly as ittakes to tell), than the tired heads began to nod and droop, and in fiveminutes half of us were sound asleep. There were no signs of our beingdismissed, while there were unmistakable signs of preparation for ameeting. I looked at a small clock hanging on the wall. It indicatedtwenty-five minutes to twelve. Heigh-ho, thought I, time is flying, andI 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. "Comeon. "

But the poor creatures were aghast. So I left them to their fate, andwent up to the nearest Salvation Army man. 

"I want to go, " I said. "I came here for breakfast in order that I mightbe in shape to look for work. I didn't think it would take so long toget breakfast. I think I have a chance for work in Stepney, and thesooner 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 themost important thing for me just now. "

As he was only a private, he referred me to the adjutant, and to theadjutant I repeated my reasons for wishing to go, and politely requestedthat he let me go. 

"But it cawn't be done, " he said, waxing virtuously indignant at suchingratitude. "The idea!" he snorted. "The idea!"

"Do you mean to say that I can't get out of here?" I demanded. "That youwill keep me here against my will?"

"Yes, " he snorted. 

I do not know what might have happened, for I was waxing indignantmyself; but the "congregation" had "piped" the situation, and he drew meover to a corner of the room, and then into another room. Here he againdemanded 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-fiveminutes to twelve. I did not think when I came in that it would take solong 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 meto find work. That is why I came here. "

"A nice thing to do, " he went on in the same sneering manner. "A manwith business shouldn't come 'ere. You've tyken some poor man'sbreakfast '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 hadplainly stated that I was homeless and hungry, and that I wished to lookfor work, for him to call my looking for work "business, " to call metherefore a business man, and to draw the corollary that a man ofbusiness, and well off, did not require a charity breakfast, and that bytaking a charity breakfast I had robbed some hungry waif who was not aman of business. 

I kept my temper, but I went over the facts again, and clearly andconcisely demonstrated to him how unjust he was and how he had pervertedthe facts. As I manifested no signs of backing down (and I am sure myeyes were beginning to snap), he led me to the rear of the buildingwhere, in an open court, stood a tent. In the same sneering tone heinformed 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 horrorwhile he went into the tent and brought out the major. Still in the samesneering manner, laying particular stress on the "business, " he broughtmy case before the commanding officer. The major was of a differentstamp of man. I liked him as soon as I saw him, and to him I stated mycase 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 Ientered 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 makeup my mind whether I had been in the army or in prison. The day was halfgone, and it was a far fetch to Stepney. And besides, it was Sunday, andwhy should even a starving man look for work on Sunday? Furthermore, itwas 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 frommy 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 cleanwhite sheets and went to sleep. It was six in the evening when I closedmy eyes. When they opened again, the clocks were striking nine nextmorning. I had slept fifteen straight hours. And as I lay theredrowsily, my mind went back to the seven hundred unfortunates I had leftwaiting for services. No bath, no shave for them, no clean white sheetsand all clothes off, and fifteen hours' straight sleep. Services over, it was the weary streets again, the problem of a crust of bread erenight, and the long sleepless night in the streets, and the pondering ofthe 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 beengreat rejoicing and elaborate tomfoolery, and I am perplexed andsaddened. I never saw anything to compare with the pageant, exceptYankee circuses and Alhambra ballets; nor did I ever see anything sohopeless and so tragic. 

To have enjoyed the Coronation procession, I should have come straightfrom America to the Hotel Cecil, and straight from the Hotel Cecil to afive-guinea seat among the washed. My mistake was in coming from theunwashed of the East End. There were not many who came from thatquarter. The East End, as a whole, remained in the East End and gotdrunk. The Socialists, Democrats, and Republicans went off to thecountry for a breath of fresh air, quite unaffected by the fact that fourhundred millions of people were taking to themselves a crowned andanointed ruler. Six thousand five hundred prelates, priests, statesmen, princes, and warriors beheld the crowning and anointing, and the rest ofus the pageant as it passed. 

I saw it at Trafalgar Square, "the most splendid site in Europe, " and thevery innermost heart of the empire. There were many thousands of us, allchecked and held in order by a superb display of armed power. The lineof march was double-walled with soldiers. The base of the Nelson Columnwas triple-fringed with bluejackets. Eastward, at the entrance to thesquare, stood the Royal Marine Artillery. In the triangle of Pall Malland Cockspur Street, the statue of George III. Was buttressed on eitherside by the Lancers and Hussars. To the west were the red-coats of theRoyal Marines, and from the Union Club to the embouchure of Whitehallswept the glittering, massive curve of the 1st Life Guards--gigantic menmounted on gigantic chargers, steel-breastplated, steel-helmeted, steel-caparisoned, a great war-sword of steel ready to the hand of the powersthat be. And further, throughout the crowd, were flung long lines of theMetropolitan Constabulary, while in the rear were the reserves--tall, well-fed men, with weapons to wield and muscles to wield them in ease ofneed. 

And as it was thus at Trafalgar Square, so was it along the whole line ofmarch--force, overpowering force; myriads of men, splendid men, the pickof the people, whose sole function in life is blindly to obey, andblindly to kill and destroy and stamp out life. And that they should bewell fed, well clothed, and well armed, and have ships to hurl them tothe ends of the earth, the East End of London, and the "East End" of allEngland, toils and rots and dies. 

There is a Chinese proverb that if one man lives in laziness another willdie of hunger; and Montesquieu has said, "The fact that many men areoccupied in making clothes for one individual is the cause of there beingmany people without clothes. " So one explains the other. We cannotunderstand the starved and runty {2} toiler of the East End (living withhis family in a one-room den, and letting out the floor space forlodgings to other starved and runty toilers) till we look at thestrapping Life Guardsmen of the West End, and come to know that the onemust feed and clothe and groom the other. 

And while in Westminster Abbey the people were taking unto themselves aking, I, jammed between the Life Guards and Constabulary of TrafalgarSquare, was dwelling upon the time when the people of Israel first tookunto themselves a king. You all know how it runs. The elders came tothe prophet Samuel, and said: "Make us a king to judge us like all thenations. "

 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 toSamuel, saying: "Pray for thy servants unto the Lord thy God, that we dienot; 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 thepeople roughly, saying: My father made your yoke heavy, but I will add toyour yoke; my father chastised you with whips, but I will chastise youwith scorpions. "

And in these latter days, five hundred hereditary peers own one-fifth ofEngland; and they, and the officers and servants under the King, andthose who go to compose the powers that be, yearly spend in wastefulluxury $1, 850, 000, 000, or 370, 000, 000 pounds, which is thirty-two percent. Of the total wealth produced by all the toilers of the country. 

At the Abbey, clad in wonderful golden raiment, amid fanfare of trumpetsand throbbing of music, surrounded by a brilliant throng of masters, lords, and rulers, the King was being invested with the insignia of hissovereignty. The spurs were placed to his heels by the Lord GreatChamberlain, and a sword of state, in purple scabbard, was presented himby 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 doublewalls of soldiers come to attention, and into view swing the King'swatermen, in fantastic mediaeval garbs of red, for all the world like thevan of a circus parade. Then a royal carriage, filled with ladies andgentlemen of the household, with powdered footmen and coachmen mostgorgeously arrayed. More carriages, lords, and chamberlains, viscounts, mistresses of the robes--lackeys all. Then the warriors, a kinglyescort, generals, bronzed and worn, from the ends of the earth come up toLondon Town, volunteer officers, officers of the militia and regularforces; Spens and Plumer, Broadwood and Cooper who relieved Ookiep, Mathias of Dargai, Dixon of Vlakfontein; General Gaselee and AdmiralSeymour of China; Kitchener of Khartoum; Lord Roberts of India and allthe world--the fighting men of England, masters of destruction, engineersof death! Another race of men from those of the shops and slums, atotally different race of men. 

But here they come, in all the pomp and certitude of power, and stillthey come, these men of steel, these war lords and world harnessers. Pell-mell, peers and commoners, princes and maharajahs, Equerries to the Kingand 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; fromRhodesia, Cape Colony, Natal, Sierra Leone and Gambia, Nigeria, andUganda; from Ceylon, Cyprus, Hong-Kong, Jamaica, and Wei-Hai-Wei; fromLagos, Malta, St. Lucia, Singapore, Trinidad. And here the conquered menof Ind, swarthy horsemen and sword wielders, fiercely barbaric, blazingin 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 agolden panoply, a hurricane of cheers, the crashing of bands--"The King!the King! God save the King!" Everybody has gone mad. The contagion issweeping me off my feet--I, too, want to shout, "The King! God save theKing!" Ragged men about me, tears in their eyes, are tossing up theirhats and crying ecstatically, "Bless 'em! Bless 'em! Bless 'em!" See, there he is, in that wondrous golden coach, the great crown flashing onhis head, the woman in white beside him likewise crowned. 

And I check myself with a rush, striving to convince myself that it isall real and rational, and not some glimpse of fairyland. This I cannotsucceed in doing, and it is better so. I much prefer to believe that allthis pomp, and vanity, and show, and mumbo-jumbo foolery has come fromfairyland, than to believe it the performance of sane and sensible peoplewho have mastered matter and solved the secrets of the stars. 

Princes and princelings, dukes, duchesses, and all manner of coronetedfolk of the royal train are flashing past; more warriors, and lackeys, and conquered peoples, and the pagent is over. I drift with the crowdout of the square into a tangle of narrow streets, where thepublic-houses are a-roar with drunkenness, men, women, and children mixedtogether in colossal debauch. And on every side is rising the favouritesong of the Coronation:-

 "Oh! on Coronation Day, on Coronation Day, We'll have a spree, a jubilee, and shout, Hip, hip, hooray, For we'll all be marry, drinking whisky, wine, and sherry, We'll all be merry on Coronation Day. "

The rain is pouring down. Up the street come troops of the auxiliaries, black Africans and yellow Asiatics, beturbaned and befezed, and cooliesswinging 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 theswarthy allegiants are cheered by their British brothers, who return atonce to the carouse. 

"And how did you like the procession, mate?" I asked an old man on abench in Green Park. 

"'Ow did I like it? A bloomin' good chawnce, sez I to myself, for asleep, wi' all the coppers aw'y, so I turned into the corner there, alongwi' fifty others. But I couldn't sleep, a-lyin' there an' thinkin' 'owI'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 almosta hanarchist an' wanted to blow out the brains o' the Lord Chamberlain. "

Why the Lord Chamberlain I could not precisely see, nor could he, butthat was the way he felt, he said conclusively, and them was no morediscussion. 

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. , " ingreat crystal letters and backed by flaming gas, was everywhere. Thecrowds in the streets increased by hundreds of thousands, and though thepolice sternly put down mafficking, drunkenness and rough play abounded. The tired workers seemed to have gone mad with the relaxation andexcitement, and they surged and danced down the streets, men and women, old and young, with linked arms and in long rows, singing, "I may becrazy, but I love you, " "Dolly Gray, " and "The Honeysuckle and theBee"--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 illuminatedwater. It was approaching midnight, and before me poured the betterclass of merrymakers, shunning the more riotous streets and returninghome. On the bench beside me sat two ragged creatures, a man and awoman, nodding and dozing. The woman sat with her arms clasped acrossthe breast, holding tightly, her body in constant play--now droppingforward till it seemed its balance would be overcome and she would fallto the pavement; now inclining to the left, sideways, till her headrested on the man's shoulder; and now to the right, stretched andstrained, till the pain of it awoke her and she sat bolt upright. Whereupon the dropping forward would begin again and go through its cycletill she was aroused by the strain and stretch. 

Every little while boys and young men stopped long enough to go behindthe bench and give vent to sudden and fiendish shouts. This alwaysjerked the man and woman abruptly from their sleep; and at sight of thestartled woe upon their faces the crowd would roar with laughter as itflooded past. 

This was the most striking thing, the general heartlessness exhibited onevery hand. It is a commonplace, the homeless on the benches, the poormiserable folk who may be teased and are harmless. Fifty thousand peoplemust have passed the bench while I sat upon it, and not one, on such ajubilee occasion as the crowning of the King, felt his heart-stringstouched 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 wittyremarks upon the woman nodding, and invariably set their companionslaughing. 

To use a Briticism, it was "cruel"; the corresponding Americanism wasmore appropriate--it was "fierce. " I confess I began to grow incensed atthis happy crowd streaming by, and to extract a sort of satisfaction fromthe London statistics which demonstrate that one in every four adults isdestined to die on public charity, either in the workhouse, theinfirmary, or the asylum. 

I talked with the man. He was fifty-four and a broken-down docker. Hecould only find odd work when there was a large demand for labour, forthe younger and stronger men were preferred when times were slack. Hehad spent a week, now, on the benches of the Embankment; but thingslooked 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 inLondon, save for five years, when, in 1878, he saw foreign service inIndia. 

Of course he would eat; so would the girl. Days like this were uncommonhard on such as they, though the coppers were so busy poor folk could getin more sleep. I awoke the girl, or woman, rather, for she was "Eyghtan' twenty, sir, " and we started for a coffee-house. 

"Wot a lot o' work puttin' up the lights, " said the man at sight of somebuilding superbly illuminated. This was the keynote of his being. Allhis fife he had worked, and the whole objective universe, as well as hisown soul, he could express in terms only of work. "Coronations is somegood, " 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 isagainst me. Wot do you work at? Seafarin' chap, eh? I knew it from yerclothes. "

"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. Iknow. "

"Lord lumne, look a' that, " she exclaimed, as we debauched upon theStrand, choked with the roaring, reeling Coronation crowd, the menbellowing 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 satdown in a coffee-house, wiping the sleep and grime from the corners ofher eyes. "An' the sights I 'ave seen this d'y, an' I enjoyed it, thoughit was lonesome by myself. An' the duchesses an' the lydies 'ad sichgran' 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 anaccident, when she had found herself on the world. One brother was inthe army, and the other brother, engaged in keeping a wife and eightchildren on twenty shillings a week and unsteady employment, could donothing for her. She had been out of London once in her life, to a placein 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 fromseven in the morning till eleven at night, and for which she had receivedfive shillings a week and her food. Then she had fallen sick, and sinceemerging from the hospital had been unable to find anything to do. Shewasn't feeling up to much, and the last two nights had been spent in thestreet. 

Between them they stowed away a prodigious amount of food, this man andwoman, and it was not till I had duplicated and triplicated theiroriginal orders that they showed signs of easing down. 

Once she reached across and felt the texture of my coat and shirt, andremarked upon the good clothes the Yanks wore. My rags good clothes! Itput me to the blush; but, on inspecting them more closely and onexamining the clothes worn by the man and woman, I began to feel quitewell dressed and respectable. 

"What do you expect to do in the end?" I asked them. "You know you'regrowing older every day. "

"Work'ouse, " said he. 

"Gawd blimey if I do, " said she. "There's no 'ope for me, I know, butI'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 youdo 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 itslongest. 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 toget 'old o' the penny. "

As we started to leave, Miss Haythorne gathered up a couple of crustsfrom 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 galanight for the homeless, for the police were elsewhere; and each bench wasjammed with sleeping occupants. There were as many women as men, and thegreat majority of them, male and female, were old. Occasionally a boywas to be seen. On one bench I noticed a family, a man sitting uprightwith a sleeping babe in his arms, his wife asleep, her head on hisshoulder, and in her lap the head of a sleeping youngster. The man'seyes 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. Itwould not be a pleasant thing to speculate upon his thoughts; but this Iknow, and all London knows, that the cases of out-of-works killing theirwives and babies is not an uncommon happening. 

One cannot walk along the Thames Embankment, in the small hours ofmorning, from the Houses of Parliament, past Cleopatra's Needle, toWaterloo Bridge, without being reminded of the sufferings, seven andtwenty 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 EdwardVII. Is king. 

CHAPTER XIII--DAN CULLEN, DOCKER

I stood, yesterday, in a room in one of the "Municipal Dwellings, " notfar from Leman Street. If I looked into a dreary future and saw that Iwould have to live in such a room until I died, I should immediately godown, plump into the Thames, and cut the tenancy short. 

It was not a room. Courtesy to the language will no more permit it to becalled a room than it will permit a hovel to be called a mansion. It wasa den, a lair. Seven feet by eight were its dimensions, and the ceilingwas so low as not to give the cubic air space required by a Britishsoldier in barracks. A crazy couch, with ragged coverlets, occupiednearly half the room. A rickety table, a chair, and a couple of boxesleft little space in which to turn around. Five dollars would havepurchased everything in sight. The floor was bare, while the walls andceiling were literally covered with blood marks and splotches. Each markrepresented a violent death--of an insect, for the place swarmed withvermin, a plague with which no person could cope single-handed. 

The man who had occupied this hole, one Dan Cullen, docker, was dying inhospital. Yet he had impressed his personality on his miserablesurroundings sufficiently to give an inkling as to what sort of man hewas. On the walls were cheap pictures of Garibaldi, Engels, Dan Burns, and other labour leaders, while on the table lay one of Walter Besant'snovels. 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 whichwas scrawled: _Mr. Cullen, please return the large white jug andcorkscrew I lent you_--articles loaned, during the first stages of hissickness, by a woman neighbour, and demanded back in anticipation of hisdeath. A large white jug and a corkscrew are far too valuable to acreature of the Abyss to permit another creature to die in peace. To thelast, Dan Cullen's soul must be harrowed by the sordidness out of whichit strove vainly to rise. 

It is a brief little story, the story of Dan Cullen, but there is much toread between the lines. He was born lowly, in a city and land where thelines of caste are tightly drawn. All his days he toiled hard with hisbody; and because he had opened the books, and been caught up by thefires of the spirit, and could "write a letter like a lawyer, " he hadbeen selected by his fellows to toil hard for them with his brain. Hebecame a leader of the fruit-porters, represented the dockers on theLondon Trades Council, and wrote trenchant articles for the labourjournals. 

He did not cringe to other men, even though they were his economicmasters, and controlled the means whereby he lived, and he spoke his mindfreely, and fought the good fight. In the "Great Dock Strike" he wasguilty 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 doesnot work according to the amount of goods on hand to be moved. DanCullen was discriminated against. While he was not absolutely turnedaway (which would have caused trouble, and which would certainly havebeen more merciful), he was called in by the foreman to do not more thantwo or three days' work per week. This is what is called being"disciplined, " or "drilled. " It means being starved. There is nopoliter word. Ten years of it broke his heart, and broken-hearted mencannot live. 

He took to his bed in his terrible den, which grew more terrible with hishelplessness. He was without kith or kin, a lonely old man, embitteredand pessimistic, fighting vermin the while and looking at Garibaldi, Engels, and Dan Burns gazing down at him from the blood-bespatteredwalls. No one came to see him in that crowded municipal barracks (he hadmade 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, hissole friends. They cleansed his room, brought fresh linen from home, andtook from off his limbs the sheets, greyish-black with dirt. And theybrought to him one of the Queen's Bounty nurses from Aldgate. 

She washed his face, shook up his conch, and talked with him. It wasinteresting to talk with him--until he learned her name. Oh, yes, Blankwas her name, she replied innocently, and Sir George Blank was herbrother. Sir George Blank, eh? thundered old Dan Cullen on his death-bed; Sir George Blank, solicitor to the docks at Cardiff, who, more thanany other man, had broken up the Dockers' Union of Cardiff, and wasknighted? And she was his sister? Thereupon Dan Cullen sat up on hiscrazy couch and pronounced anathema upon her and all her breed; and shefled, to return no more, strongly impressed with the ungratefulness ofthe poor. 

Dan Cullen's feet became swollen with dropsy. He sat up all day on theside 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. Amissionary brought him a pair of paper slippers, worth fourpence (I sawthem), and proceeded to offer up fifty prayers or so for the good of DanCullen's soul. But Dan Cullen was the sort of man that wanted his soulleft alone. He did not care to have Tom, Dick, or Harry, on the strengthof fourpenny slippers, tampering with it. He asked the missionary kindlyto open the window, so that he might toss the slippers out. And themissionary went away, to return no more, likewise impressed with theungratefulness of the poor. 

The cobbler, a brave old hero himself, though unaneled and unsung, wentprivily to the head office of the big fruit brokers for whom Dan Cullenhad worked as a casual labourer for thirty years. Their system was suchthat the work was almost entirely done by casual hands. The cobbler toldthem the man's desperate plight, old, broken, dying, without help ormoney, reminded them that he had worked for them thirty years, and askedthem to do something for him. 

"Oh, " said the manager, remembering Dan Cullen without having to refer tothe books, "you see, we make it a rule never to help casuals, and we cando nothing. "

Nor did they do anything, not even sign a letter asking for Dan Cullen'sadmission to a hospital. And it is not so easy to get into a hospital inLondon Town. At Hampstead, if he passed the doctors, at least fourmonths would elapse before he could get in, there were so many on thebooks ahead of him. The cobbler finally got him into the WhitechapelInfirmary, where he visited him frequently. Here he found that DanCullen had succumbed to the prevalent feeling, that, being hopeless, theywere hurrying him out of the way. A fair and logical conclusion, onemust agree, for an old and broken man to arrive at, who has beenresolutely "disciplined" and "drilled" for ten years. When they sweatedhim for Bright's disease to remove the fat from the kidneys, Dan Cullencontended that the sweating was hastening his death; while Bright'sdisease, being a wasting away of the kidneys, there was therefore no fatto remove, and the doctor's excuse was a palpable lie. Whereupon thedoctor 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. Atonce dropsy appeared in the body, and Dan Cullen contended that the thingwas done in order to run the water down into his body from his legs andkill him more quickly. He demanded his discharge, though they told himhe would die on the stairs, and dragged himself, more dead than alive, tothe cobbler's shop. At the moment of writing this, he is dying at theTemperance 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 thenight; who dreamed his dream and struck valiantly for the Cause; apatriot, a lover of human freedom, and a fighter unafraid; and in theend, not gigantic enough to beat down the conditions which baffled andstifled him, a cynic and a pessimist, gasping his final agony on apauper's couch in a charity ward, --"For a man to die who might have beenwise 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, thatthe farming districts, the civilised world over, are dependent upon thecities for the gathering of the harvests. Then it is, when the land isspilling its ripe wealth to waste, that the street folk, who have beendriven away from the soil, are called back to it again. But in Englandthey return, not as prodigals, but as outcasts still, as vagrants andpariahs, to be doubted and flouted by their country brethren, to sleep injails and casual wards, or under the hedges, and to live the Lord knowshow. 

It is estimated that Kent alone requires eighty thousand of the streetpeople to pick her hops. And out they come, obedient to the call, whichis the call of their bellies and of the lingering dregs of adventure-luststill in them. Slum, stews, and ghetto pour them forth, and thefestering contents of slum, stews, and ghetto are undiminished. Yet theyoverrun the country like an army of ghouls, and the country does not wantthem. They are out of place. As they drag their squat, misshapen bodiesalong the highways and byways, they resemble some vile spawn fromunderground. Their very presence, the fact of their existence, is anoutrage to the fresh, bright sun and the green and growing things. Theclean, upstanding trees cry shame upon them and their witheredcrookedness, and their rottenness is a slimy desecration of the sweetnessand purity of nature. 

Is the picture overdrawn? It all depends. For one who sees and thinkslife in terms of shares and coupons, it is certainly overdrawn. But forone who sees and thinks life in terms of manhood and womanhood, it cannotbe overdrawn. Such hordes of beastly wretchedness and inarticulatemisery are no compensation for a millionaire brewer who lives in a WestEnd palace, sates himself with the sensuous delights of London's goldentheatres, hobnobs with lordlings and princelings, and is knighted by theking. Wins his spurs--God forbid! In old time the great blonde beastsrode in the battle's van and won their spurs by cleaving men from pate tochine. 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 hisseed through the generations, by the artful and spidery manipulation ofindustry and politics. 

But to return to the hops. Here the divorcement from the soil is asapparent as in every other agricultural line in England. While themanufacture of beer steadily increases, the growth of hops steadilydecreases. In 1835 the acreage under hops was 71, 327. To-day it standsat 48, 024, a decrease of 3103 from the acreage of last year. 

Small as the acreage is this year, a poor summer and terrible stormsreduced the yield. This misfortune is divided between the people who ownhops and the people who pick hops. The owners perforce must put up withless 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 headlineslike 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 andhoppers were well-nigh swept away by a frightful storm of wind, rain, andhail. The hops were stripped clean from the poles and pounded into theearth, while the hoppers, seeking shelter from the stinging hail, wereclose to drowning in their huts and camps on the low-lying ground. Theircondition after the storm was pitiable, their state of vagrancy morepronounced than ever; for, poor crop that it was, its destruction hadtaken away the chance of earning a few pennies, and nothing remained forthousands 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 atthe seven bushels for a shilling--a rate paid in good seasons when thehops are in prime condition, and a rate likewise paid in bad seasons bythe growers because they cannot afford more. 

I passed through Teston and East and West Farleigh shortly after thestorm, and listened to the grumbling of the hoppers and saw the hopsrotting on the ground. At the hothouses of Barham Court, thirty thousandpanes of glass had been broken by the hail, while peaches, plums, pears, apples, rhubarb, cabbages, mangolds, everything, had been pounded topieces and torn to shreds. 

All of which was too bad for the owners, certainly; but at the worst, notone of them, for one meal, would have to go short of food or drink. Yetit was to them that the newspapers devoted columns of sympathy, theirpecuniary losses being detailed at harrowing length. "Mr. Herbert L---calculates his loss at 8000 pounds;" "Mr. F---, of brewery fame, whorents all the land in this parish, loses 10, 000 pounds;" and "Mr. L---, the Wateringbury brewer, brother to Mr. Herbert L---, is another heavyloser. " As for the hoppers, they did not count. Yet I venture to assertthat the several almost-square meals lost by underfed William Buggles, and underfed Mrs. Buggles, and the underfed Buggles kiddies, was agreater tragedy than the 10, 000 pounds lost by Mr. F---. And inaddition, underfed William Buggles' tragedy might be multiplied bythousands where Mr. F---'s could not be multiplied by five. 

To see how William Buggles and his kind fared, I donned my seafaring togsand 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 thetrip. Acting on my advice, he had brought his "worst rags, " and as wehiked up the London road out of Maidstone he was worrying greatly forfear we had come too ill-dressed for the business. 

Nor was he to be blamed. When we stopped in a tavern the publican eyedus gingerly, nor did his demeanour brighten till we showed him the colourof our cash. The natives along the coast were all dubious; and "bean-feasters" from London, dashing past in coaches, cheered and jeered andshouted insulting things after us. But before we were done with theMaidstone district my friend found that we were as well clad, if notbetter, than the average hopper. Some of the bunches of rags we chancedupon were marvellous. 

"The tide is out, " called a gypsy-looking woman to her mates, as we cameup 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 thetide 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 mypresence 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 facedand elderly man who was very busy. 

His "No" was decisively uttered; but Bert clung on and followed himabout, and I followed after, pretty well all over the field. Whether ourpersistency struck the bailiff as anxiety to work, or whether he wasaffected by our hard-luck appearance and tale, neither Bert nor Isucceeded in making out; but in the end he softened his heart and foundus 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 inthe midst of the women. 

It was Saturday afternoon, and we knew quitting time would come early; sowe applied ourselves earnestly to the task, desiring to learn if we couldat least make our salt. It was simple work, woman's work, in fact, andnot 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 anhour's time we became as expert as it is possible to become. As soon asthe fingers became accustomed automatically to differentiate between hopsand leaves and to strip half-a-dozen blossoms at a time there was no moreto learn. 

We worked nimbly, and as fast as the women themselves, though their binsfilled more rapidly because of their swarming children, each of whichpicked with two hands almost as fast as we picked. 

"Don'tcher pick too clean, it's against the rules, " one of the womeninformed us; and we took the tip and were grateful. 

As the afternoon wore along, we realised that living wages could not bemade--by men. Women could pick as much as men, and children could doalmost as well as women; so it was impossible for a man to compete with awoman and half-a-dozen children. For it is the woman and the half-dozenchildren who count as a unit, and by their combined capacity determinethe unit's pay. 

"I say, matey, I'm beastly hungry, " said I to Bert. We had not had anydinner. 

"Blimey, but I could eat the 'ops, " he replied. 

Whereupon we both lamented our negligence in not rearing up a numerousprogeny to help us in this day of need. And in such fashion we whiledaway the time and talked for the edification of our neighbours. We quitewon the sympathy of the pole-puller, a young country yokel, who now andagain emptied a few picked blossoms into our bin, it being part of hisbusiness to gather up the stray clusters torn off in the process ofpulling. 

With him we discussed how much we could "sub, " and were informed thatwhile we were being paid a shilling for seven bushels, we could only"sub, " or have advanced to us, a shilling for every twelve bushels. Whichis to say that the pay for five out of every twelve bushels waswithheld--a method of the grower to hold the hopper to his work whetherthe crop runs good or bad, and especially if it runs bad. 

After all, it was pleasant sitting there in the bright sunshine, thegolden pollen showering from our hands, the pungent aromatic odour of thehops biting our nostrils, and the while remembering dimly the soundingcities whence these people came. Poor street people! Poor gutter folk!Even they grow earth-hungry, and yearn vaguely for the soil from whichthey have been driven, and for the free life in the open, and the windand rain and sun all undefiled by city smirches. As the sea calls to thesailor, so calls the land to them; and, deep down in their aborted anddecaying carcasses, they are stirred strangely by the peasant memories oftheir forbears who lived before cities were. And in incomprehensibleways they are made glad by the earth smells and sights and sounds whichtheir 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 thateverything could be cleaned up, there being no work on Sunday. For anhour we were forced idly to wait the coming of the measurers, our feettingling with the frost which came on the heels of the setting sun. Inthe adjoining bin, two women and half-a-dozen children had picked ninebushels: so that the five bushels the measurers found in our bindemonstrated that we had done equally well, for the half-dozen childrenhad ranged from nine to fourteen years of age. 

Five bushels! We worked it out to eight-pence ha'penny, or seventeencents, for two men working three hours and a half. Fourpence farthingapiece! 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 notmove him. He proclaimed loudly that we had received a penny more thanour due, and went his way. 

Granting, for the sake of the argument, that we were what we representedourselves to be--namely, poor men and broke--then here was out position:night was coming on; we had had no supper, much less dinner; and wepossessed sixpence between us. I was hungry enough to eat threesixpenn'orths of food, and so was Bert. One thing was patent. By doing16. 3 per cent. Justice to our stomachs, we would expend the sixpence, andour stomachs would still be gnawing under 83. 3 per cent. Injustice. Beingbroke again, we could sleep under a hedge, which was not so bad, thoughthe cold would sap an undue portion of what we had eaten. But the morrowwas Sunday, on which we could do no work, though our silly stomachs wouldnot knock off on that account. Here, then, was the problem: how to getthree 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 beggedfrom farmer or villager, there was a large likelihood of our going tojail for fourteen days. What was to be done? We looked at each other indespair--

--Not a bit of it. We joyfully thanked God that we were not as othermen, especially hoppers, and went down the road to Maidstone, jingling inour 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 thatis 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 wasnecessary before she could bring herself to let me sleep in her frontroom. In the evening I descended to the semi-subterranean kitchen, andtalked with her and her old man, Thomas Mugridge by name. 

And as I talked to them, all the subtleties and complexities of thistremendous machine civilisation vanished away. It seemed that I wentdown through the skin and the flesh to the naked soul of it, and inThomas Mugridge and his old woman gripped hold of the essence of thisremarkable English breed. I found there the spirit of the wanderlustwhich has lured Albion's sons across the zones; and I found there thecolossal unreckoning which has tricked the English into foolishsquabblings and preposterous fights, and the doggedness and stubbornnesswhich have brought them blindly through to empire and greatness; andlikewise I found that vast, incomprehensible patience which has enabledthe home population to endure under the burden of it all, to toil withoutcomplaint through the weary years, and docilely to yield the best of itssons to fight and colonise to the ends of the earth. 

Thomas Mugridge was seventy-one years old and a little man. It wasbecause he was little that he had not gone for a soldier. He hadremained at home and worked. His first recollections were connected withwork. He knew nothing else but work. He had worked all his days, and atseventy-one he still worked. Each morning saw him up with the lark andafield, a day labourer, for as such he had been born. Mrs. Mugridge wasseventy-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 myadvent, cooking for me and shaming me by making my bed. At the end ofthreescore years and more of work they possessed nothing, had nothing tolook forward to save more work. And they were contented. They expectednothing else, desired nothing else. 

They lived simply. Their wants were few--a pint of beer at the end ofthe day, sipped in the semi-subterranean kitchen, a weekly paper to poreover for seven nights hand-running, and conversation as meditative andvacant as the chewing of a heifer's cud. From a wood engraving on thewall a slender, angelic girl looked down upon them, and underneath wasthe legend: "Our Future Queen. " And from a highly coloured lithographalongside looked down a stout and elderly lady, with underneath: "OurQueen--Diamond Jubilee. "

"What you earn is sweetest, " quoth Mrs. Mugridge, when I suggested thatit was about time they took a rest. 

"No, an' we don't want help, " said Thomas Mugridge, in reply to myquestion as to whether the children lent them a hand. 

"We'll work till we dry up and blow away, mother an' me, " he added; andMrs. 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 thechildren married they had their hands full with their own families andtroubles, like their fathers and mothers before them. 

Where were the children? Ah, where were they not? Lizzie was inAustralia; Mary was in Buenos Ayres; Poll was in New York; Joe had diedin India--and so they called them up, the living and the dead, soldierand sailor, and colonist's wife, for the traveller's sake who sat intheir kitchen. 

They passed me a photograph. A trim young fellow, in soldier's garblooked out at me. 

"And which son is this?" I asked. 

They laughed a hearty chorus. Son! Nay, grandson, just back from Indianservice and a soldier-trumpeter to the King. His brother was in the sameregiment with him. And so it ran, sons and daughters, and grand sons anddaughters, world-wanderers and empire-builders, all of them, while theold 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 runningout, and the planet is filling up. The wives of her sons may carry onthe breed, but her work is past. The erstwhile men of England are nowthe men of Australia, of Africa, of America. England has sent forth "thebest she breeds" for so long, and has destroyed those that remained sofiercely, that little remains for her to do but to sit down through thelong nights and gaze at royalty on the wall. 

The true British merchant seaman has passed away. The merchant serviceis no longer a recruiting ground for such sea dogs as fought with Nelsonat Trafalgar and the Nile. Foreigners largely man the merchant ships, though Englishmen still continue to officer them and to prefer foreignersfor'ard. In South Africa the colonial teaches the islander how to shoot, and the officers muddle and blunder; while at home the street people playhysterically at mafficking, and the War Office lowers the stature forenlistment. 

It could not be otherwise. The most complacent Britisher cannot hope todraw off the life-blood, and underfeed, and keep it up forever. Theaverage Mrs. Thomas Mugridge has been driven into the city, and she isnot breeding very much of anything save an anaemic and sickly progenywhich cannot find enough to eat. The strength of the English-speakingrace to-day is not in the tight little island, but in the New Worldoverseas, where are the sons and daughters of Mrs. Thomas Mugridge. TheSea 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 tiredloins for a space; and if the casual ward and the workhouse do not awaither, it is because of the sons and daughters she has reared up againstthe day of her feebleness and decay. 

CHAPTER XVI--PROPERTY VERSUS PERSON

In a civilisation frankly materialistic and based upon property, notsoul, it is inevitable that property shall be exalted over soul, thatcrimes against property shall be considered far more serious than crimesagainst the person. To pound one's wife to a jelly and break a few ofher ribs is a trivial offence compared with sleeping out under the nakedstars because one has not the price of a doss. The lad who steals a fewpears from a wealthy railway corporation is a greater menace to societythan the young brute who commits an unprovoked assault upon an old manover seventy years of age. While the young girl who takes a lodgingunder the pretence that she has work commits so dangerous an offence, that, were she not severely punished, she and her kind might bring thewhole fabric of property clattering to the ground. Had she unholilytramped Piccadilly and the Strand after midnight, the police would nothave interfered with her, and she would have been able to pay for herlodging. 

The following illustrative cases are culled from the police-court reportsfor a single week:-

 Widnes Police Court. Before Aldermen Gossage and Neil. Thomas Lynch, charged with being drunk and disorderly and with assaulting a constable. Defendant rescued a woman from custody, kicked the constable, and threw stones at him. Fined 3s. 6d. For the first offence, and 10s. And costs for the assault. 

 Glasgow Queen's Park Police Court. Before Baillie Norman Thompson. John Kane pleaded guilty to assaulting his wife. There were five previous convictions. Fined 2 pounds, 2s. 

 Taunton County Petty Sessions. John Painter, a big, burly fellow, described as a labourer, charged with assaulting his wife. The woman received two severe black eyes, and her face was badly swollen. Fined 1 pound, 8s. , including costs, and bound over to keep the peace. 

 Widnes Police Court. Richard Bestwick and George Hunt, charged with trespassing in search of game. Hunt fined 1 pound and costs, Bestwick 2 pounds and costs; in default, one month. 

 Shaftesbury Police Court. Before the Mayor (Mr. A. T. Carpenter). Thomas Baker, charged with sleeping out. Fourteen days. 

 Glasgow Central Police Court. Before Bailie Dunlop. Edward Morrison, a lad, convicted of stealing fifteen pears from a lorry at the railroad station. Seven days. 

 Doncaster Borough Police Court. Before Alderman Clark and other magistrates. James M'Gowan, charged under the Poaching Prevention Act with being found in possession of poaching implements and a number of rabbits. Fined 2 pounds and costs, or one month. 

 Dunfermline Sheriff Court. Before Sheriff Gillespie. John Young, a pit-head worker, pleaded guilty to assaulting Alexander Storrar by beating him about the head and body with his fists, throwing him on the ground, and also striking him with a pit prop. Fined 1 pound. 

 Kirkcaldy Police Court. Before Bailie Dishart. Simon Walker pleaded guilty to assaulting a man by striking and knocking him down. It was an unprovoked assault, and the magistrate described the accused as a perfect danger to the community. Fined 30s. 

 Mansfield Police Court. Before the Mayor, Messrs. F. J. Turner, J. Whitaker, F. Tidsbury, E. Holmes, and Dr. R. Nesbitt. Joseph Jackson, charged with assaulting Charles Nunn. Without any provocation, defendant struck the complainant a violent blow in the face, knocking him down, and then kicked him on the side of the head. He was rendered unconscious, and he remained under medical treatment for a fortnight. Fined 21s. 

 Perth Sheriff Court. Before Sheriff Sym. David Mitchell, charged with poaching. There were two previous convictions, the last being three years ago. The sheriff was asked to deal leniently with Mitchell, who was sixty-two years of age, and who offered no resistance to the gamekeeper. Four months. 

 Dundee Sheriff Court. Before Hon. Sheriff-Substitute R. C. Walker. John Murray, Donald Craig, and James Parkes, charged with poaching. Craig and Parkes fined 1 pound each or fourteen days; Murray, 5 pounds or one month. 

 Reading Borough Police Court. Before Messrs. W. B. Monck, F. B. Parfitt, H. M. Wallis, and G. Gillagan. Alfred Masters, aged sixteen, charged with sleeping out on a waste piece of ground and having no visible means of subsistence. Seven days. 

 Salisbury City Petty Sessions. Before the Mayor, Messrs. C. Hoskins, G. Fullford, E. Alexander, and W. Marlow. James Moore, charged with stealing a pair of boots from outside a shop. Twenty-one days. 

 Horncastle Police Court. Before the Rev. W. F. Massingberd, the Rev. J. Graham, and Mr. N. Lucas Calcraft. George Brackenbury, a young labourer, convicted of what the magistrates characterised as an altogether unprovoked and brutal assault upon James Sargeant Foster, a man over seventy years of age. Fined 1 pound and 5s. 6d. Costs. 

 Worksop Petty Sessions. Before Messrs. F. J. S. Foljambe, R. Eddison, and S. Smith. John Priestley, charged with assaulting the Rev. Leslie Graham. Defendant, who was drunk, was wheeling a perambulator and pushed it in front of a lorry, with the result that the perambulator was overturned and the baby in it thrown out. The lorry passed over the perambulator, but the baby was uninjured. Defendant then attacked the driver of the lorry, and afterwards assaulted the complainant, who remonstrated with him upon his conduct. In consequence of the injuries defendant inflicted, complainant had to consult a doctor. Fined 40s. And costs. 

 Rotherham West Riding Police Court. Before Messrs. C. Wright and G. Pugh and Colonel Stoddart. Benjamin Storey, Thomas Brammer, and Samuel Wilcock, charged with poaching. One month each. 

 Southampton County Police Court. Before Admiral J. C. Rowley, Mr. H. H. Culme-Seymour, and other magistrates. Henry Thorrington, charged with sleeping out. Seven days. 

 Eckington Police Court. Before Major L. B. Bowden, Messrs. R. Eyre, and H. A. Fowler, and Dr. Court. Joseph Watts, charged with stealing nine ferns from a garden. One month. 

 Ripley Petty Sessions. Before Messrs. J. B. Wheeler, W. D. Bembridge, and M. Hooper. Vincent Allen and George Hall, charged under the Poaching Prevention Act with being found in possession of a number of rabbits, and John Sparham, charged with aiding and abetting them. Hall and Sparham fined 1 pound, 17s. 4d. , and Allen 2 pounds, 17s. 4d. , including costs; the former committed for fourteen days and the latter for one month in default of payment. 

 South-western Police Court, London. Before Mr. Rose. John Probyn, charged with doing grievous bodily harm to a constable. Prisoner had been kicking his wife, and also assaulting another woman who protested against his brutality. The constable tried to persuade him to go inside his house, but prisoner suddenly turned upon him, knocking him down by a blow on the face, kicking him as he lay on the ground, and attempting to strangle him. Finally the prisoner deliberately kicked the officer in a dangerous part, inflicting an injury which will keep him off duty for a long time to come. Six weeks. 

 Lambeth Police Court, London. Before Mr. Hopkins. "Baby" Stuart, aged nineteen, described as a chorus girl, charged with obtaining food and lodging to the value of 5s. By false pretences, and with intent to defraud Emma Brasier. Emma Brasier, complainant, lodging-house keeper of Atwell Road. Prisoner took apartments at her house on the representation that she was employed at the Crown Theatre. After prisoner had been in her house two or three days, Mrs. Brasier made inquiries, and, finding the girl's story untrue, gave her into custody. Prisoner told the magistrate that she would have worked had she not had such bad health. Six weeks' hard labour. 

CHAPTER XVII--INEFFICIENCY

I stopped a moment to listen to an argument on the Mile End Waste. Itwas night-time, and they were all workmen of the better class. They hadsurrounded one of their number, a pleasant-faced man of thirty, and weregiving it to him rather heatedly. 

"But 'ow about this 'ere cheap immigration?" one of them demanded. "TheJews of Whitechapel, say, a-cutting our throats right along?"

"You can't blame them, " was the answer. "They're just like us, andthey've got to live. Don't blame the man who offers to work cheaper thanyou 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 theman who works cheaper than you and gets your job? Eh? How about hiswife and kiddies? He's more interested in them than in yours, and hecan'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 alwayscome down when two men are after the same job. That's the fault ofcompetition, not of the man who cuts the price. "

"But wyges don't come down where there's a union, " the objection wasmade. 

"And there you are again, right on the head. The union cheekscompetition among the labourers, but makes it harder where there are nounions. There's where your cheap labour of Whitechapel comes in. They'reunskilled, and have no unions, and cut each other's throats, and ours inthe bargain, if we don't belong to a strong union. "

Without going further into the argument, this man on the Mile End Wastepointed the moral that when two men were after the one job wages werebound to fall. Had he gone deeper into the matter, he would have foundthat even the union, say twenty thousand strong, could not hold up wagesif twenty thousand idle men were trying to displace the union men. Thisis admirably instanced, just now, by the return and disbandment of thesoldiers from South Africa. They find themselves, by tens of thousands, in desperate straits in the army of the unemployed. There is a generaldecline in wages throughout the land, which, giving rise to labourdisputes and strikes, is taken advantage of by the unemployed, who gladlypick up the tools thrown down by the strikers. 

Sweating, starvation wages, armies of unemployed, and great numbers ofthe homeless and shelterless are inevitable when there are more men to dowork than there is work for men to do. The men and women I have met uponthe streets, and in the spikes and pegs, are not there because as a modeof life it may be considered a "soft snap. " I have sufficiently outlinedthe hardships they undergo to demonstrate that their existence isanything but "soft. "

It is a matter of sober calculation, here in England, that it is softerto work for twenty shillings a week, and have regular food, and a bed atnight, than it is to walk the streets. The man who walks the streetssuffers more, and works harder, for far less return. I have depicted thenights they spend, and how, driven in by physical exhaustion, they go tothe casual ward for a "rest up. " Nor is the casual ward a soft snap. Topick four pounds of oakum, break twelve hundredweight of stones, orperform the most revolting tasks, in return for the miserable food andshelter they receive, is an unqualified extravagance on the part of themen who are guilty of it. On the part of the authorities it is sheerrobbery. They give the men far less for their labour than do thecapitalistic employers. The wage for the same amount of labour, performed for a private employer, would buy them better beds, betterfood, more good cheer, and, above all, greater freedom. 

As I say, it is an extravagance for a man to patronise a casual ward. Andthat they know it themselves is shown by the way these men shun it tilldriven in by physical exhaustion. Then why do they do it? Not becausethey are discouraged workers. The very opposite is true; they arediscouraged vagabonds. In the United States the tramp is almostinvariably a discouraged worker. He finds tramping a softer mode of lifethan working. But this is not true in England. Here the powers that bedo their utmost to discourage the tramp and vagabond, and he is, in alltruth, a mightily discouraged creature. He knows that two shillings aday, which is only fifty cents, will buy him three fair meals, a bed atnight, and leave him a couple of pennies for pocket money. He wouldrather work for those two shillings than for the charity of the casualward; for he knows that he would not have to work so hard, and that hewould not be so abominably treated. He does not do so, however, becausethere 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-outprocess must obtain. In every branch of industry the less efficient arecrowded out. Being crowded out because of inefficiency, they cannot goup, but must descend, and continue to descend, until they reach theirproper level, a place in the industrial fabric where they are efficient. It follows, therefore, and it is inexorable, that the least efficientmust descend to the very bottom, which is the shambles wherein theyperish miserably. 

A glance at the confirmed inefficients at the bottom demonstrates thatthey are, as a rule, mental, physical, and moral wrecks. The exceptionsto the rule are the late arrivals, who are merely very inefficient, andupon whom the wrecking process is just beginning to operate. All theforces here, it must be remembered, are destructive. The good body(which is there because its brain is not quick and capable) is speedilywrenched and twisted out of shape; the clean mind (which is there becauseof its weak body) is speedily fouled and contaminated. 

The mortality is excessive, but, even then, they die far too lingeringdeaths. 

Here, then, we have the construction of the Abyss and the shambles. Throughout the whole industrial fabric a constant elimination is goingon. The inefficient are weeded out and flung downward. Various thingsconstitute inefficiency. The engineer who is irregular or irresponsiblewill sink down until he finds his place, say as a casual labourer, anoccupation irregular in its very nature and in which there is little orno responsibility. Those who are slow and clumsy, who suffer fromweakness of body or mind, or who lack nervous, mental, and physicalstamina, must sink down, sometimes rapidly, sometimes step by step, tothe bottom. Accident, by disabling an efficient worker, will make himinefficient, and down he must go. And the worker who becomes aged, withfailing energy and numbing brain, must begin the frightful descent whichknows no stopping-place short of the bottom and death. 

In this last instance, the statistics of London tell a terrible tale. Thepopulation of London is one-seventh of the total population of the UnitedKingdom, and in London, year in and year out, one adult in every fourdies on public charity, either in the workhouse, the hospital, or theasylum. When the fact that the well-to-do do not end thus is taken intoconsideration, it becomes manifest that it is the fate of at least one inevery 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, aman thirty-two years of age, and an inmate of the workhouse. Theextracts are quoted from the annual report of the trade union. 

 I worked at Sullivan's place in Widnes, better known as the British Alkali Chemical Works. I was working in a shed, and I had to cross the yard. It was ten o'clock at night, and there was no light about. While crossing the yard I felt something take hold of my leg and screw it off. I became unconscious; I didn't know what became of me for a day or two. On the following Sunday night I came to my senses, and found myself in the hospital. I asked the nurse what was to do with my legs, and she told me both legs were off. 

 There was a stationary crank in the yard, let into the ground; the hole was 18 inches long, 15 inches deep, and 15 inches wide. The crank revolved in the hole three revolutions a minute. There was no fence or covering over the hole. Since my accident they have stopped it altogether, and have covered the hole up with a piece of sheet iron. . . . They gave me 25 pounds. They didn't reckon that as compensation; they said it was only for charity's sake. Out of that I paid 9 pounds for a machine by which to wheel myself about. 

 I was labouring at the time I got my legs off. I got twenty-four shillings a week, rather better pay than the other men, because I used to take shifts. When there was heavy work to be done I used to be picked out to do it. Mr. Manton, the manager, visited me at the hospital several times. When I was getting better, I asked him if he would be able to find me a job. He told me not to trouble myself, as the firm was not cold-hearted. I would be right enough in any case . . . Mr. Manton stopped coming to see me; and the last time, he said he thought of asking the directors to give me a fifty-pound note, so I could go home to my friends in Ireland. 

Poor M'Garry! He received rather better pay than the other men becausehe was ambitious and took shifts, and when heavy work was to be done hewas the man picked out to do it. And then the thing happened, and hewent into the workhouse. The alternative to the workhouse is to go hometo Ireland and burden his friends for the rest of his life. Comment issuperfluous. 

It must be understood that efficiency is not determined by the workersthemselves, but is determined by the demand for labour. If three menseek one position, the most efficient man will get it. The other two, nomatter how capable they may be, will none the less be inefficients. IfGermany, Japan, and the United States should capture the entire worldmarket for iron, coal, and textiles, at once the English workers would bethrown idle by hundreds of thousands. Some would emigrate, but the restwould rush their labour into the remaining industries. A general shakingup of the workers from top to bottom would result; and when equilibriumhad been restored, the number of the inefficients at the bottom of theAbyss would have been increased by hundreds of thousands. On the otherhand, conditions remaining constant and all the workers doubling theirefficiency, there would still be as many inefficients, though eachinefficient were twice as capable as he had been and more capable thanmany of the efficients had previously been. 

When there are more men to work than there is work for men to do, just asmany men as are in excess of work will be inefficients, and asinefficients they are doomed to lingering and painful destruction. Itshall be the aim of future chapters to show, by their work and manner ofliving, not only how the inefficients are weeded out and destroyed, butto show how inefficients are being constantly and wantonly created by theforces of industrial society as it exists to-day. 

CHAPTER XVIII--WAGES

When I learned that in Lesser London there were 1, 292, 737 people whoreceived twenty-one shillings or less a week per family, I becameinterested as to how the wages could best be spent in order to maintainthe physical efficiency of such families. Families of six, seven, eightor ten being beyond consideration, I have based the following table upona family of five--a father, mother, and three children; while I have madetwenty-one shillings equivalent to $5. 25, though actually, twenty-oneshillings are equivalent to about $5. 11. 

Rent $1. 50 or 6/0Bread 1. 00 " 4/0Meat O. 87. 5 " 3/6Vegetables O. 62. 5 " 2/6Coals 0. 25 " 1/0Tea 0. 18 " 0/9Oil 0. 16 " 0/8Sugar 0. 18 " 0/9Milk 0. 12 " 0/6Soap 0. 08 " 0/4Butter 0. 20 " 0/10Firewood 0. 08 " 0/4Total $5. 25 21/2

An analysis of one item alone will show how little room there is forwaste. _Bread_, $1: for a family of five, for seven days, one dollar'sworth of bread will give each a daily ration of 2. 8 cents; and if theyeat three meals a day, each may consume per meal 9. 5 mills' worth ofbread, a little less than one halfpennyworth. Now bread is the heaviestitem. They will get less of meat per mouth each meal, and still less ofvegetates; while the smaller items become too microscopic forconsideration. On the other hand, these food articles are all bought atsmall retail, the most expensive and wasteful method of purchasing. 

While the table given above will permit no extravagance, no overloadingof stomachs, it will be noticed that there is no surplus. The wholeguinea 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; andin so far as it eats less, just that far will it impair its physicalefficiency. The members of this family cannot ride in busses or trams, cannot write letters, take outings, go to a "tu'penny gaff" for cheapvaudeville, 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 ofshoes, the family must strike meat for a week from its bill of fare. Andsince there are five pairs of feet requiring shoes, and five headsrequiring hats, and five bodies requiring clothes, and since there arelaws regulating indecency, the family must constantly impair its physicalefficiency 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; andthat 4. 5d. Cannot be lessened by buying clothes without impairing thephysical efficiency. 

All of which is hard enough. But the thing happens; the husband andfather breaks his leg or his neck. No 4. 5d. A day per mouth for food iscoming in; no halfpennyworth of bread per meal; and, at the end of theweek, no six shillings for rent. So out they must go, to the streets orthe workhouse, or to a miserable den, somewhere, in which the mother willdesperately endeavour to hold the family together on the ten shillingsshe may possibly be able to earn. 

While in London there are 1, 292, 737 people who receive twenty-oneshillings or less a week per family, it must be remembered that we haveinvestigated a family of five living on a twenty-one shilling basis. There are larger families, there are many families that live on less thantwenty-one shillings, and there is much irregular employment. Thequestion naturally arises, How do _they_ live? The answer is that theydo not live. They do not know what life is. They drag out asubterbestial existence until mercifully released by death. 

Before descending to the fouler depths, let the case of the telephonegirls be cited. Here are clean, fresh English maids, for whom a higherstandard of living than that of the beasts is absolutely necessary. Otherwise they cannot remain clean, fresh English maids. On entering theservice, a telephone girl receives a weekly wage of eleven shillings. Ifshe be quick and clever, she may, at the end of five years, attain aminimum wage of one pound. Recently a table of such a girl's weeklyexpenditure was furnished to Lord Londonderry. Here it is:-

 s. D. Rent, fire, and light 7 6Board at home 3 6Board at the office 4 6Street car fare 1 6Laundry 1 0Total 18 0

This leaves nothing for clothes, recreation, or sickness. And yet manyof the girls are receiving, not eighteen shillings, but eleven shillings, twelve shillings, and fourteen shillings per week. They must haveclothes 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 tointroduce a Bill to prohibit the employment of children under fifteenyears of age. Mr. Shackleton, Member of Parliament and a representativeof the Northern Counties Weavers, opposed the resolution on behalf of thetextile workers, who, he said, could not dispense with the earnings oftheir children and live on the scale of wages which obtained. Therepresentatives of 514, 000 workers voted against the resolution, whilethe representatives of 535, 000 workers voted in favour of it. When514, 000 workers oppose a resolution prohibiting child-labour underfifteen, it is evident that a less-than-living wage is being paid to animmense number of the adult workers of the country. 

I have spoken with women in Whitechapel who receive right along less thanone shilling for a twelve-hour day in the coat-making sweat shops; andwith women trousers finishers who receive an average princely and weeklywage of three to four shillings. 

A case recently cropped up of men, in the employ of a wealthy businesshouse, receiving their board and six shillings per week for six workingdays of sixteen hours each. The sandwich men get fourteenpence per dayand find themselves. The average weekly earnings of the hawkers andcostermongers are not more than ten to twelve shillings. The average ofall common labourers, outside the dockers, is less than sixteen shillingsper week, while the dockers average from eight to nine shillings. Thesefigures are taken from a royal commission report and are authentic. 

Conceive of an old woman, broken and dying, supporting herself and fourchildren, and paying three shillings per week rent, by making match boxesat 2. 25d. Per gross. Twelve dozen boxes for 2. 25d. , and, in addition, finding her own paste and thread! She never knew a clay off, either forsickness, rest, or recreation. Each day and every day, Sundays as well, she toiled fourteen hours. Her day's stint was seven gross, for whichshe received 1s. 3. 75d. In the week of ninety-eight hours' work, shemade 7066 match boxes, and earned 4s. 10. 25d. , less per paste and thread. 

Last year, Mr. Thomas Holmes, a police-court missionary of note, afterwriting about the condition of the women workers, received the followingletter, 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, grammaticalletter, supporting her husband and self on five shillings per week! Mr. Holmes visited her. He had to squeeze to get into the room. There layher sick husband; there she worked all day long; there she cooked, ate, washed, and slept; and there her husband and she performed all thefunctions of living and dying. There was no space for the missionary tosit down, save on the bed, which was partially covered with ties andsilk. The sick man's lungs were in the last stages of decay. He coughedand expectorated constantly, the woman ceasing from her work to assisthim in his paroxysms. The silken fluff from the ties was not good forhis sickness; nor was his sickness good for the ties, and the handlersand wearers of the ties yet to come. 

Another case Mr. Holmes visited was that of a young girl, twelve years ofage, charged in the police court with stealing food. He found her thedeputy mother of a boy of nine, a crippled boy of seven, and a youngerchild. Her mother was a widow and a blouse-maker. She paid fiveshillings a week rent. Here are the last items in her housekeepingaccount: 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 atable for five, and keeping an eye on your deputy mother of twelve to seethat she did not steal food for her little brothers and sisters, thewhile 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 cityghettos. But to-day the dominant economic class, by less arbitrary butnone the less rigorous methods, has confined the undesirable yetnecessary workers into ghettos of remarkable meanness and vastness. EastLondon 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 intothe East End, but the tide is setting strongly in that direction. Thepoor quarters of the city proper are constantly being destroyed, and themain stream of the unhoused is toward the east. In the last twelveyears, one district, "London over the Border, " as it is called, whichlies well beyond Aldgate, Whitechapel, and Mile End, has increased260, 000, or over sixty per cent. The churches in this district, by theway, can seat but one in every thirty-seven of the added population. 

The City of Dreadful Monotony, the East End is often called, especiallyby well-fed, optimistic sightseers, who look over the surface of thingsand are merely shocked by the intolerable sameness and meanness of itall. If the East End is worthy of no worse title than The City ofDreadful Monotony, and if working people are unworthy of variety andbeauty 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 Cityof Degradation. 

While it is not a city of slums, as some people imagine, it may well besaid to be one gigantic slum. From the standpoint of simple decency andclean manhood and womanhood, any mean street, of all its mean streets, isa slum. Where sights and sounds abound which neither you nor I wouldcare to have our children see and hear is a place where no man's childrenshould live, and see, and hear. Where you and I would not care to haveour wives pass their lives is a place where no other man's wife shouldhave to pass her life. For here, in the East End, the obscenities andbrute vulgarities of life are rampant. There is no privacy. The badcorrupts the good, and all fester together. Innocent childhood is sweetand beautiful: but in East London innocence is a fleeting thing, and youmust catch them before they crawl out of the cradle, or you will find thevery babes as unholily wise as you. 

The application of the Golden Rule determines that East London is anunfit place in which to live. Where you would not have your own babelive, and develop, and gather to itself knowledge of life and the thingsof life, is not a fit place for the babes of other men to live, anddevelop, and gather to themselves knowledge of life and the things oflife. 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 sayotherwise. What is not good enough for you is not good enough for othermen, and there's no more to be said. 

There are 300, 000 people in London, divided into families, that live inone-room tenements. Far, far more live in two and three rooms and are asbadly crowded, regardless of sex, as those that live in one room. Thelaw demands 400 cubic feet of space for each person. In army barrackseach soldier is allowed 600 cubic feet. Professor Huxley, at one timehimself a medical officer in East London, always held that each personshould have 800 cubic feet of space, and that it should be wellventilated with pure air. Yet in London there are 900, 000 people livingin less than the 400 cubic feet prescribed by the law. 

Mr. Charles Booth, who engaged in a systematic work of years in chartingand classifying the toiling city population, estimates that there are1, 800, 000 people in London who are _poor_ and _very poor_. It is ofinterest to mark what he terms poor. By _poor_ he means families whichhave 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 theireconomic masters; and this process, with its jamming and overcrowding, tends not so much toward immorality as unmorality. Here is an extractfrom a recent meeting of the London County Council, terse and bald, butwith 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, theauthorities have their hands full. When the overcrowded folk are ejectedthey stray off into some other hole; and, as they move their belongingsby night, on hand-barrows (one hand-barrow accommodating the entirehousehold goods and the sleeping children), it is next to impossible tokeep track of them. If the Public Health Act of 1891 were suddenly andcompletely enforced, 900, 000 people would receive notice to clear out oftheir houses and go on to the streets, and 500, 000 rooms would have to bebuilt before they were all legally housed again. 

The mean streets merely look mean from the outside, but inside the wallsare to be found squalor, misery, and tragedy. While the followingtragedy may be revolting to read, it must not be forgotten that theexistence of it is far more revolting. 

In Devonshire Place, Lisson Grove, a short while back died an old womanof seventy-five years of age. At the inquest the coroner's officerstated that "all he found in the room was a lot of old rags covered withvermin. He had got himself smothered with the vermin. The room was in ashocking condition, and he had never seen anything like it. Everythingwas 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 withvermin, and all the clothes in the room were absolutely grey withinsects. Deceased was very badly nourished and was very emaciated. Shehad extensive sores on her legs, and her stockings were adherent to thosesores. The sores were the result of vermin. "

A man present at the inquest wrote: "I had the evil fortune to see thebody of the unfortunate woman as it lay in the mortuary; and even now thememory of that gruesome sight makes me shudder. There she lay in themortuary shell, so starved and emaciated that she was a mere bundle ofskin and bones. Her hair, which was matted with filth, was simply a nestof 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 notgood for this woman, whosoever's mother she might be, so to die. 

Bishop Wilkinson, who has lived in Zululand, recently said, "No human ofan African village would allow such a promiscuous mixing of young men andwomen, boys and girls. " He had reference to the children of theovercrowded folk, who at five have nothing to learn and much to unlearnwhich they will never unlearn. 

It is notorious that here in the Ghetto the houses of the poor aregreater profit earners than the mansions of the rich. Not only does thepoor worker have to live like a beast, but he pays proportionately morefor 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 forhouses. There are more people than there is room, and numbers are in theworkhouse because they cannot find shelter elsewhere. Not only arehouses 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 awindow not five minutes' walk from St. James's Hall. The Rev. Hugh PriceHughes is authority for the statement that beds are let on thethree-relay system--that is, three tenants to a bed, each occupying iteight hours, so that it never grows cold; while the floor spaceunderneath the bed is likewise let on the three-relay system. Healthofficers are not at all unused to finding such cases as the following: inone room having a cubic capacity of 1000 feet, three adult females in thebed, and two adult females under the bed; and in one room of 1650 cubicfeet, one adult male and two children in the bed, and two adult femalesunder the bed. 

Here is a typical example of a room on the more respectable two-relaysystem. It is occupied in the daytime by a young woman employed allnight 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 hevacates, 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 ofthe 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. Nearlyfifty per cent. Of the workers pay from one-fourth to one-half of theirearnings for rent. The average rent in the larger part of the East Endis from four to six shillings per week for one room, while skilledmechanics, earning thirty-five shillings per week, are forced to partwith fifteen shillings of it for two or three pokey little dens, in whichthey strive desperately to obtain some semblance of home life. And rentsare going up all the time. In one street in Stepney the increase in onlytwo years has been from thirteen to eighteen shillings; in another streetfrom eleven to sixteen shillings; and in another street, from eleven tofifteen shillings; while in Whitechapel, two-room houses that recentlyrented for ten shillings are now costing twenty-one shillings. East, west, north, and south the rents are going up. When land is worth from20, 000 to 30, 000 pounds an acre, some one must pay the landlord. 

Mr. W. C. Steadman, in the House of Commons, in a speech concerning hisconstituency 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 workersare segregated in the Ghetto, they cannot escape the consequentdegradation. A short and stunted people is created--a breed strikinglydifferentiated from their masters' breed, a pavement folk, as it werelacking stamina and strength. The men become caricatures of whatphysical men ought to be, and their women and children are pale andanaemic, with eyes ringed darkly, who stoop and slouch, and are earlytwisted out of all shapeliness and beauty. 

To make matters worse, the men of the Ghetto are the men who are left--adeteriorated stock, left to undergo still further deterioration. For ahundred and fifty years, at least, they have been drained of their best. The strong men, the men of pluck, initiative, and ambition, have beenfaring forth to the fresher and freer portions of the globe, to make newlands and nations. Those who are lacking, the weak of heart and head andhand, as well as the rotten and hopeless, have remained to carry on thebreed. And year by year, in turn, the best they breed are taken fromthem. Wherever a man of vigour and stature manages to grow up, he ishaled forthwith into the army. A soldier, as Bernard Shaw has said, "ostensibly a heroic and patriotic defender of his country, is really anunfortunate man driven by destitution to offer himself as food for powderfor the sake of regular rations, shelter, and clothing. "

This constant selection of the best from the workers has impoverishedthose who are left, a sadly degraded remainder, for the great part, which, in the Ghetto, sinks to the deepest depths. The wine of life hasbeen drawn off to spill itself in blood and progeny over the rest of theearth. Those that remain are the lees, and they are segregated andsteeped in themselves. They become indecent and bestial. When theykill, they kill with their hands, and then stupidly surrender themselvesto the executioners. There is no splendid audacity about theirtransgressions. They gouge a mate with a dull knife, or beat his head inwith an iron pot, and then sit down and wait for the police. Wife-beatingis the masculine prerogative of matrimony. They wear remarkable boots ofbrass and iron, and when they have polished off the mother of theirchildren with a black eye or so, they knock her down and proceed totrample her very much as a Western stallion tramples a rattlesnake. 

A woman of the lower Ghetto classes is as much the slave of her husbandas is the Indian squaw. And I, for one, were I a woman and had but thetwo choices, should prefer being a squaw. The men are economicallydependent on their masters, and the women are economically dependent onthe men. The result is, the woman gets the beating the man should givehis master, and she can do nothing. There are the kiddies, and he is thebread-winner, and she dare not send him to jail and leave herself andchildren to starve. Evidence to convict can rarely be obtained when suchcases come into the courts; as a rule, the trampled wife and mother isweeping and hysterically beseeching the magistrate to let her husband offfor the kiddies' sakes. 

The wives become screaming harridans or, broken-spirited and doglike, lose what little decency and self-respect they have remaining over fromtheir maiden days, and all sink together, unheeding, in their degradationand dirt. 

Sometimes I become afraid of my own generalizations upon the massedmisery of this Ghetto life, and feel that my impressions are exaggerated, that I am too close to the picture and lack perspective. At such momentsI find it well to turn to the testimony of other men to prove to myselfthat I am not becoming over-wrought and addle-pated. Frederick Harrisonhas always struck me as being a level-headed, well-controlled man, and hesays:-

 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 tomultiply 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 anddrab. Everything is helpless, hopeless, unrelieved, and dirty. Bathtubs are a thing totally unknown, as mythical as the ambrosia of thegods. The people themselves are dirty, while any attempt at cleanlinessbecomes howling farce, when it is not pitiful and tragic. Strange, vagrant odours come drifting along the greasy wind, and the rain, when itfalls, is more like grease than water from heaven. The very cobblestonesare scummed with grease. 

Here lives a population as dull and unimaginative as its long grey milesof dingy brick. Religion has virtually passed it by, and a gross andstupid materialism reigns, fatal alike to the things of the spirit andthe finer instincts of life. 

It used to be the proud boast that every Englishman's home was hiscastle. 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. Eventhe municipal dwellings, where live the better-class workers, areovercrowded barracks. They have no home life. The very language provesit. The father returning from work asks his child in the street whereher mother is; and back the answer comes, "In the buildings. "

A new race has sprung up, a street people. They pass their lives at workand in the streets. They have dens and lairs into which to crawl forsleeping purposes, and that is all. One cannot travesty the word bycalling such dens and lairs "homes. " The traditional silent and reservedEnglishman has passed away. The pavement folk are noisy, voluble, high-strung, excitable--when they are yet young. As they grow older theybecome 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 ofthem. He will stand there, motionless, for hours, and when you go awayyou will leave him still staring into vacancy. It is most absorbing. Hehas no money for beer, and his lair is only for sleeping purposes, sowhat else remains for him to do? He has already solved the mysteries ofgirl's love, and wife's love, and child's love, and found them delusionsand shams, vain and fleeting as dew-drops, quick-vanishing before theferocious facts of life. 

As I say, the young are high-strung, nervous, excitable; the middle-agedare empty-headed, stolid, and stupid. It is absurd to think for aninstant that they can compete with the workers of the New World. Brutalised, degraded, and dull, the Ghetto folk will be unable to renderefficient service to England in the world struggle for industrialsupremacy which economists declare has already begun. Neither as workersnor 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 theworld's industrial orbit, they will perish like flies at the end ofsummer. Or, with England critically situated, and with them madedesperate as wild beasts are made desperate, they may become a menace andgo "swelling" down to the West End to return the "slumming" the West Endhas done in the East. In which case, before rapid-fire guns and themodern machinery of warfare, they will perish the more swiftly andeasily. 

CHAPTER XX--COFFEE-HOUSES AND DOSS-HOUSES

Another phrase gone glimmering, shorn of romance and tradition and allthat goes to make phrases worth keeping! For me, henceforth, "coffee-house" will possess anything but an agreeable connotation. Over on theother side of the world, the mere mention of the word was sufficient toconjure up whole crowds of its historic frequenters, and to send troopingthrough my imagination endless groups of wits and dandies, pamphleteersand bravos, and bohemians of Grub Street. 

But here, on this side of the world, alas and alack, the very name is amisnomer. Coffee-house: a place where people drink coffee. Not at all. You cannot obtain coffee in such a place for love or money. True, youmay call for coffee, and you will have brought you something in a cuppurporting to be coffee, and you will taste it and be disillusioned, forcoffee 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 putself-respect into him. Table-cloths and napkins are unknown. A man eatsin the midst of the debris left by his predecessor, and dribbles his ownscraps about him and on the floor. In rush times, in such places, I havepositively waded through the muck and mess that covered the floor, and Ihave managed to eat because I was abominably hungry and capable of eatinganything. 

This seems to be the normal condition of the working-man, from the zestwith which he addresses himself to the board. Eating is a necessity, andthere are no frills about it. He brings in with him a primitivevoraciousness, and, I am confident, carries away with him a fairlyhealthy appetite. When you see such a man, on his way to work in themorning, 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 theother, depend upon it, that man has not the right sort of stuff in hisbelly, nor enough of the wrong sort of stuff, to fit him for big day'swork. And further, depend upon it, he and a thousand of his kind willnot turn out the quantity or quality of work that a thousand men will whohave eaten heartily of meat and potatoes, and drunk coffee that iscoffee. 

As a vagrant in the "Hobo" of a California jail, I have been servedbetter food and drink than the London workman receives in hiscoffee-houses; while as an American labourer I have eaten a breakfast fortwelvepence such as the British labourer would not dream of eating. Ofcourse, 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 twoand a half. On the other hand, though, and in return, I would turn outan amount of work in the course of the day that would put to shame theamount he turned out. So there are two sides to it. The man with thehigh standard of living will always do more work and better than the manwith the low standard of living. 

There is a comparison which sailormen make between the English andAmerican merchant services. In an English ship, they say, it is poorgrub, 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 bothcountries. The ocean greyhounds have to pay for speed and steam, and sodoes the workman. But if the workman is not able to pay for it, he willnot have the speed and steam, that is all. The proof of it is when theEnglish workman comes to America. He will lay more bricks in New Yorkthan he will in London, still more bricks in St. Louis, and still morebricks when he gets to San Francisco. {3} His standard of living hasbeen rising all the time. 

Early in the morning, along the streets frequented by workmen on the wayto 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. Theydo not even wash the dry bread down with the tea to be obtained for apenny in the coffee-houses. It is incontestable that a man is not fit tobegin his day's work on a meal like that; and it is equally incontestablethat the loss will fall upon his employer and upon the nation. For sometime, now, statesmen have been crying, "Wake up, England!" It would showmore 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 stoodoutside a butcher-shop and watched a horde of speculative housewivesturning 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 thesehousewives, no more than I would vouch for the cleanliness of the singlerooms in which many of them and their families lived; yet they raked, andpawed, and scraped the mess about in their anxiety to get the worth oftheir coppers. I kept my eye on one particularly offensive-looking bitof meat, and followed it through the clutches of over twenty women, tillit fell to the lot of a timid-appearing little woman whom the butcherbluffed into taking it. All day long this heap of scraps was added toand 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 thebarrows all day, and very often store it in their one living and sleepingroom for the night. There it is exposed to the sickness and disease, theeffluvia and vile exhalations of overcrowded and rotten life, and nextday 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 heeats. Judging from the coffee-houses, which is a fair criterion, theynever know in all their lives what tea, coffee, or cocoa tastes like. Theslops and water-witcheries of the coffee-houses, varying only insloppiness and witchery, never even approximate or suggest what you and Iare accustomed to drink as tea and coffee. 

A little incident comes to me, connected with a coffee-house not far fromJubilee Street on the Mile End Road. 

"Cawn yer let me 'ave somethin' for this, daughter? Anythin', Hi don'tmind. 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 helda penny. The one she had addressed as "daughter" was a careworn woman offorty, proprietress and waitress of the house. 

I waited, possibly as anxiously as the old woman, to see how the appealwould be received. It was four in the afternoon, and she looked faintand 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 itis my judgment that the lamb was mutton and that the peas might have beenyounger without being youthful. However, the point is, the dish was soldat sixpence, and the proprietress gave it for a penny, demonstrating anewthe old truth that the poor are the most charitable. 

The old woman, profuse in her gratitude, took a seat on the other side ofthe narrow table and ravenously attacked the smoking stew. We atesteadily and silently, the pair of us, when suddenly, explosively andmost gleefully, she cried out to me, --

"Hi sold a box o' matches! Yus, " she confirmed, if anything with greaterand more explosive glee. "Hi sold a box o' matches! That's 'ow Hi gotthe penny. "

"You must be getting along in years, " I suggested. 

"Seventy-four yesterday, " she replied, and returned with gusto to herplate. 

"Blimey, I'd like to do something for the old girl, that I would, butthis is the first I've 'ad to-dy, " the young fellow alongside volunteeredto me. "An' I only 'ave this because I 'appened to make an odd shillingwashin' 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 myquestions; "nothin' but odd jobs a blessed long wy between. "

* * * * *

One meets with all sorts of adventures in coffee-house, and I shall notsoon forget a Cockney Amazon in a place near Trafalgar Square, to whom Itendered a sovereign when paying my score. (By the way, one is supposedto pay before he begins to eat, and if he be poorly dressed he iscompelled 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?" Iretorted. 

"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 Ihad 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, sheamplified the retort courteous in divers vivid and unprintable ways. 

I never had much talent for repartee, but she knocked silly what little Ihad, and I gulped down my tea a beaten man, while she gloated after meeven as I passed out to the street. 

While 300, 000 people of London live in one-room tenements, and 900, 000are illegally and viciously housed, 38, 000 more are registered as livingin common lodging-houses--known in the vernacular as "doss-houses. " Thereare many kinds of doss-houses, but in one thing they are all alike, fromthe filthy little ones to the monster big ones paying five per cent. Andblatantly lauded by smug middle-class men who know but one thing aboutthem, and that one thing is their uninhabitableness. By this I do notmean that the roofs leak or the walls are draughty; but what I do mean isthat life in them is degrading and unwholesome. 

"The poor man's hotel, " they are often called, but the phrase iscaricature. Not to possess a room to one's self, in which sometimes tosit alone; to be forced out of bed willy-nilly, the first thing in themorning; to engage and pay anew for a bed each night; and never to haveany privacy, surely is a mode of existence quite different from that ofhotel life. 

This must not be considered a sweeping condemnation of the big privateand municipal lodging-houses and working-men's homes. Far from it. Theyhave remedied many of the atrocities attendant upon the irresponsiblesmall doss-houses, and they give the workman more for his money than heever received before; but that does not make them as habitable orwholesome as the dwelling-place of a man should be who does his work inthe world. 

The little private doss-houses, as a rule, are unmitigated horrors. Ihave slept in them, and I know; but let me pass them by and confinemyself to the bigger and better ones. Not far from Middlesex Street, Whitechapel, I entered such a house, a place inhabited almost entirely byworking men. The entrance was by way of a flight of steps descendingfrom the sidewalk to what was properly the cellar of the building. Herewere two large and gloomily lighted rooms, in which men cooked and ate. Ihad intended to do some cooking myself, but the smell of the place stoleaway my appetite, or, rather, wrested it from me; so I contented myselfwith watching other men cook and eat. 

One workman, home from work, sat down opposite me at the rough woodentable, and began his meal. A handful of salt on the not over-clean tableconstituted his butter. Into it he dipped his bread, mouthful bymouthful, and washed it down with tea from a big mug. A piece of fishcompleted his bill of fare. He ate silently, looking neither to rightnor left nor across at me. Here and there, at the various tables, othermen were eating, just as silently. In the whole room there was hardly anote 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 mewonder, as Childe Roland wondered, what evil they had done that theyshould be punished so. 

From the kitchen came the sounds of more genial life, and I ventured intothe range where the men were cooking. But the smell I had noticed onentering was stronger here, and a rising nausea drove me into the streetfor fresh air. 

On my return I paid fivepence for a "cabin, " took my receipt for the samein the form of a huge brass check, and went upstairs to the smoking-room. Here, a couple of small billiard tables and several checkerboards werebeing used by young working-men, who waited in relays for their turn atthe games, while many men were sitting around, smoking, reading, andmending their clothes. The young men were hilarious, the old men weregloomy. In fact, there were two types of men, the cheerful and thesodden or blue, and age seemed to determine the classification. 

But no more than the two cellar rooms did this room convey the remotestsuggestion of home. Certainly there could be nothing home-like about itto you and me, who know what home really is. On the walls were the mostpreposterous 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 thebrass check to a burly doorkeeper, and by climbing a long flight ofstairs into the upper regions. I went to the top of the building anddown again, passing several floors filled with sleeping men. The"cabins" were the best accommodation, each cabin allowing space for atiny bed and room alongside of it in which to undress. The bedding wasclean, and with neither it nor the bed do I find any fault. But therewas no privacy about it, no being alone. 

To get an adequate idea of a floor filled with cabins, you have merely tomagnify a layer of the pasteboard pigeon-holes of an egg-crate till eachpigeon-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, thewalls are thin, and the snores from all the sleepers and every move andturn of your nearer neighbours come plainly to your ears. And this cabinis yours only for a little while. In the morning out you go. You cannotput your trunk in it, or come and go when you like, or lock the doorbehind 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 impressupon you constantly that you are nobody, with little soul of your own andless to say about it. 

Now I contend that the least a man who does his day's work should have isa room to himself, where he can lock the door and be safe in hispossessions; 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 afew personal belongings other than those he carries about with him on hisback and in his pockets; where he can hang up pictures of his mother, sister, sweet-heart, ballet dancers, or bulldogs, as his heart listeth--inshort, one place of his own on the earth of which he can say: "This ismine, my castle; the world stops at the threshold; here am I lord andmaster. " He will be a better citizen, this man; and he will do a betterday's work. 

I stood on one floor of the poor man's hotel and listened. I went frombed to bed and looked at the sleepers. They were young men, from twentyto 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'skisses, their necks for women's arms. They were lovable, as men arelovable. They were capable of love. A woman's touch redeems andsoftens, and they needed such redemption and softening instead of eachday 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 hadwronged him and the law had wronged him. The merits and morals of thecase are immaterial. The meat of the matter is that she had obtained aseparation, and he was compelled to pay ten shillings each week for thesupport 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 geta 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 thework'ouse, an' that's 'ell. An' if she don't go to the work'ouse, it'llbe a worse 'ell. Come along 'ith me an' I'll show you women sleepin' ina passage, a dozen of 'em. An' I'll show you worse, wot she'll come toif anythin' 'appens to me and the ten shillings. "

The certitude of this man's forecast is worthy of consideration. He knewconditions sufficiently to know the precariousness of his wife's grasp onfood and shelter. For her game was up when his working capacity wasimpaired or destroyed. And when this state of affairs is looked at inits larger aspect, the same will be found true of hundreds of thousandsand even millions of men and women living amicably together andco-operating in the pursuit of food and shelter. 

The figures are appalling: 1, 800, 000 people in London live on the povertyline and below it, and 1, 000, 000 live with one week's wages between themand pauperism. In all England and Wales, eighteen per cent. Of the wholepopulation are driven to the parish for relief, and in London, accordingto the statistics of the London County Council, twenty-one per cent. Ofthe whole population are driven to the parish for relief. Between beingdriven to the parish for relief and being an out-and-out pauper there isa great difference, yet London supports 123, 000 paupers, quite a city offolk 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, and20, 000, 000 more are not comfortable in the simple and clean sense of theword. 

It is interesting to go more into detail concerning the London people whodie on charity. 

In 1886, and up to 1893, the percentage of pauperism to population wasless in London than in all England; but since 1893, and for everysucceeding year, the percentage of pauperism to population has beengreater in London than in all England. Yet, from the Registrar-General'sReport for 1886, the following figures are taken:-

Out of 81, 951 deaths in London (1884):-

In workhouses 9, 909In hospitals 6, 559In lunatic asylums 278Total in public refuges 16, 746

Commenting on these figures, a Fabian writer says: "Considering thatcomparatively few of these are children, it is probable that one in everythree London adults will be driven into one of these refuges to die, andthe proportion in the case of the manual labour class must of course bestill larger. "

These figures serve somewhat to indicate the proximity of the averageworker 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 aninmate of a London workhouse, brought before a magistrate fornon-performance of task. He claimed that he had done his various taskssince he had been an inmate; but when the master set him to breakingstones, his hands blistered, and he could not finish the task. He hadnever been used to an implement heavier than a pen, he said. Themagistrate sentenced him and his blistered hands to seven days' hardlabour. 

Old age, of course, makes pauperism. And then there is the accident, thething happening, the death or disablement of the husband, father, andbread-winner. Here is a man, with a wife and three children, living onthe ticklish security of twenty shillings per week--and there arehundreds of thousands of such families in London. Perforce, to even halfexist, 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 orstarvation. The thing happens, the father is struck down, and what then?A mother with three children can do little or nothing. Either she musthand her children over to society as juvenile paupers, in order to befree 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 herreduced income. But with the sweat-shops, married women who eke outtheir husband's earnings, and single women who have but themselvesmiserably to support, determine the scale of wages. And this scale ofwages, so determined, is so low that the mother and her three childrencan live only in positive beastliness and semi-starvation, till decay anddeath end their suffering. 

To show that this mother, with her three children to support, cannotcompete in the sweating industries, I instance from the currentnewspapers the two following cases:-

A father indignantly writes that his daughter and a girl companionreceive 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, and1d. For string, so that all they earned between them was 1s. 9d. , or adaily wage each of 10. 5d. 

In the second ewe, before the Luton Guardians a few days ago, an oldwoman of seventy-two appeared, asking for relief. "She was a straw-hatmaker, but had been compelled to give up the work owing to the price sheobtained for them--namely, 2. 25d. Each. For that price she had toprovide plait trimmings and make and finish the hats. "

Yet this mother and her three children we are considering have done nowrong that they should be so punished. They have not sinned. The thinghappened, that is all; the husband, father and bread-winner, was struckdown. There is no guarding against it. It is fortuitous. A familystands so many chances of escaping the bottom of the Abyss, and so manychances 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 thepeople who live in the Ghetto plays a terrible part. The average age atdeath among the people of the West End is fifty-five years; the averageage at death among the people of the East End is thirty years. That isto say, the person in the West End has twice the chance for life that theperson has in the East End. Talk of war! The mortality in South Africaand the Philippines fades away to insignificance. Here, in the heart ofpeace, is where the blood is being shed; and here not even the civilisedrules of warfare obtain, for the women and children and babes in the armsare killed just as ferociously as the men are killed. War! In England, every year, 500, 000 men, women, and children, engaged in the variousindustries, are killed and disabled, or are injured to disablement bydisease. 

In the West End eighteen per cent. Of the children die before five yearsof age; in the East End fifty-five per cent. Of the children die beforefive years of age. And there are streets in London where out of everyone hundred children born in a year, fifty die during the next year; andof 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 nobetter substantiation can be given than the following extract from arecent report of the Liverpool Medical Officer, which is not applicableto 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'sparishes (London parishes):-

 Percentage of Population Death-rate Overcrowded per 1000St. George's West 10 13. 2St. George's South 35 23. 7St. George's East 40 26. 4

Then there are the "dangerous trades, " in which countless workers areemployed. Their hold on life is indeed precarious--far, far moreprecarious than the hold of the twentieth-century soldier on life. Inthe linen trade, in the preparation of the flax, wet feet and wet clothescause an unusual amount of bronchitis, pneumonia, and severe rheumatism;while in the carding and spinning departments the fine dust produces lungdisease in the majority of cases, and the woman who starts carding atseventeen or eighteen begins to break up and go to pieces at thirty. Thechemical labourers, picked from the strongest and most splendidly-builtmen 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 killsuddenly, but settles, year after year, a little more firmly into thelungs, until at length a case of plaster is formed. Breathing becomesmore and more difficult and depressed, and finally ceases. "

Steel dust, stone dust, clay dust, alkali dust, fluff dust, fibredust--all these things kill, and they are more deadly than machine-gunsand pom-poms. Worst of all is the lead dust in the white-lead trades. Here is a description of the typical dissolution of a young, healthy, well-developed girl who goes to work in a white-lead factory:-

 Here, after a varying degree of exposure, she becomes anaemic. It may be that her gums show a very faint blue line, or perchance her teeth and gums are perfectly sound, and no blue line is discernible. Coincidently with the anaemia she has been getting thinner, but so gradually as scarcely to impress itself upon her or her friends. Sickness, however, ensues, and headaches, growing in intensity, are developed. These are frequently attended by obscuration of vision or temporary blindness. Such a girl passes into what appears to her friends and medical adviser as ordinary hysteria. This gradually deepens without warning, until she is suddenly seized with a convulsion, beginning in one half of the face, then involving the arm, next the leg of the same side of the body, until the convulsion, violent and purely epileptic form in character, becomes universal. This is attended by loss of consciousness, out of which she passes into a series of convulsions, gradually increasing in severity, in one of which she dies--or consciousness, partial or perfect, is regained, either, it may be, for a few minutes, a few hours, or days, during which violent headache is complained of, or she is delirious and excited, as in acute mania, or dull and sullen as in melancholia, and requires to be roused, when she is found wandering, and her speech is somewhat imperfect. Without further warning, save that the pulse, which has become soft, with nearly the normal number of beats, all at once becomes low and hard; she is suddenly seized with another convulsion, in which she dies, or passes into a state of coma from which she never rallies. In another case the convulsions will gradually subside, the headache disappears and the patient recovers, only to find that she has completely lost her eyesight, a loss that may be temporary or permanent. 

And here are a few specific cases of white-lead poisoning:-

 Charlotte Rafferty, a fine, well-grown young woman with a splendid constitution--who had never had a day's illness in her life--became a white-lead worker. Convulsions seized her at the foot of the ladder in the works. Dr. Oliver examined her, found the blue line along her gums, which shows that the system is under the influence of the lead. He knew that the convulsions would shortly return. They did so, and she died. 

 Mary Ann Toler--a girl of seventeen, who had never had a fit in her life--three times became ill, and had to leave off work in the factory. Before she was nineteen she showed symptoms of lead poisoning--had fits, frothed at the mouth, and died. 

 Mary A. , an unusually vigorous woman, was able to work in the lead factory for _twenty years_, having colic once only during that time. Her eight children all died in early infancy from convulsions. One morning, whilst brushing her hair, this woman suddenly lost all power in both her wrists. 

 Eliza H. , aged twenty-five, _after five months_ at lead works, was seized with colic. She entered another factory (after being refused by the first one) and worked on uninterruptedly for two years. Then the former symptoms returned, she was seized with convulsions, and died in two days of acute lead poisoning. 

Mr. Vaughan Nash, speaking of the unborn generation, says: "The childrenof the white-lead worker enter the world, as a rule, only to die from theconvulsions of lead poisoning--they are either born prematurely, or diewithin the first year. "

And, finally, let me instance the case of Harriet A. Walker, a young girlof seventeen, killed while leading a forlorn hope on the industrialbattlefield. She was employed as an enamelled ware brusher, wherein leadpoisoning is encountered. Her father and brother were both out ofemployment. She concealed her illness, walked six miles a day to andfrom work, earned her seven or eight shillings per week, and died, atseventeen. 

Depression in trade also plays an important part in hurling the workersinto the Abyss. With a week's wages between a family and pauperism, amonth's enforced idleness means hardship and misery almost indescribable, and from the ravages of which the victims do not always recover when workis to be had again. Just now the daily papers contain the report of ameeting of the Carlisle branch of the Dockers' Union, wherein it isstated that many of the men, for months past, have not averaged a weeklyincome of more than from four to five shillings. The stagnated state ofthe shipping industry in the port of London is held accountable for thiscondition of affairs. 

To the young working-man or working-woman, or married couple, there is noassurance of happy or healthy middle life, nor of solvent old age. Workas they will, they cannot make their future secure. It is all a matterof chance. Everything depends upon the thing happening, the thing withwhich they have nothing to do. Precaution cannot fend it off, nor canwiles evade it. If they remain on the industrial battlefield they mustface it and take their chance against heavy odds. Of course, if they arefavourably made and are not tied by kinship duties, they may run awayfrom the industrial battlefield. In which event the safest thing the mancan do is to join the army; and for the woman, possibly, to become a RedCross nurse or go into a nunnery. In either case they must forego homeand children and all that makes life worth living and old age other thana nightmare. 

CHAPTER XXII--SUICIDE

With life so precarious, and opportunity for the happiness of life soremote, it is inevitable that life shall be cheap and suicide common. Socommon is it, that one cannot pick up a daily paper without runningacross it; while an attempt-at-suicide case in a police court excites nomore interest than an ordinary "drunk, " and is handled with the samerapidity and unconcern. 

I remember such a case in the Thames Police Court. I pride myself that Ihave 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 bewilderedby the amazing despatch with which drunks, disorderlies, vagrants, brawlers, wife-beaters, thieves, fences, gamblers, and women of thestreet went through the machine of justice. The dock stood in the centreof the court (where the light is best), and into it and out again steppedmen, women, and children, in a stream as steady as the stream ofsentences which fell from the magistrate's lips. 

I was still pondering over a consumptive "fence" who had pleadedinability to work and necessity for supporting wife and children, and whohad received a year at hard labour, when a young boy of about twentyappeared in the dock. "Alfred Freeman, " I caught his name, but failed tocatch the charge. A stout and motherly-looking woman bobbed up in thewitness-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 foundthe 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 hisforehead, his face haggard and careworn and boyish still. 

"Yes, sir, " the lock-keeper's wife was saying. "As fast as I pulled toget '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 thecourt-room laughed; but all I could see was a boy on the threshold oflife, passionately crawling to muddy death, and there was no laughter init. 

A man was now in the witness-box, testifying to the boy's good characterand 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, moneymatters. And then his mother was sick. He was given to worrying, and heworried 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 beingbad, 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 thenreplied loudly, "He says he's very sorry, your Worship. "

"Remanded, " said his Worship; and the next case was under way, the firstwitness already engaged in taking the oath. The boy, dazed andunheeding, passed out with the jailer. That was all, five minutes fromstart to finish; and two hulking brutes in the dock were tryingstrenuously to shift the responsibility of the possession of a stolenfishing-pole, worth probably ten cents. 

The chief trouble with these poor folk is that they do not know how tocommit suicide, and usually have to make two or three attempts beforethey succeed. This, very naturally, is a horrid nuisance to theconstables and magistrates, and gives them no end of trouble. Sometimes, however, the magistrates are frankly outspoken about the matter, andcensure the prisoners for the slackness of their attempts. For instanceMr. R. S---, chairman of the S--- B--- magistrates, in the case the otherday of Ann Wood, who tried to make away with herself in the canal: "Ifyou wanted to do it, why didn't you do it and get it done with?" demandedthe indignant Mr. R. S---. "Why did you not get under the water and makean end of it, instead of giving us all this trouble and bother?"

Poverty, misery, and fear of the workhouse, are the principal causes ofsuicide among the working classes. "I'll drown myself before I go intothe workhouse, " said Ellen Hughes Hunt, aged fifty-two. Last Wednesdaythey held an inquest on her body at Shoreditch. Her husband came fromthe Islington Workhouse to testify. He had been a cheesemonger, butfailure 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 andjacket were found on the towing path by the Regent's Canal, and later herbody was fished from the water. _Verdict: Suicide during temporaryinsanity_. 

Such verdicts are crimes against truth. The Law is a lie, and through itmen lie most shamelessly. For instance, a disgraced woman, forsaken andspat upon by kith and kin, doses herself and her baby with laudanum. Thebaby dies; but she pulls through after a few weeks in hospital, ischarged with murder, convicted, and sentenced to ten years' penalservitude. Recovering, the Law holds her responsible for her actions;yet, had she died, the same Law would have rendered a verdict oftemporary insanity. 

Now, considering the case of Ellen Hughes Hunt, it is as fair and logicalto say that her husband was suffering from temporary insanity when hewent into the Islington Workhouse, as it is to say that she was sufferingfrom temporary insanity when she went into the Regent's Canal. As towhich is the preferable sojourning place is a matter of opinion, ofintellectual judgment. I, for one, from what I know of canals andworkhouses, should choose the canal, were I in a similar position. And Imake bold to contend that I am no more insane than Ellen Hughes Hunt, herhusband, and the rest of the human herd. 

Man no longer follows instinct with the old natural fidelity. He hasdeveloped into a reasoning creature, and can intellectually cling to lifeor discard life just as life happens to promise great pleasure or pain. Idare to assert that Ellen Hughes Hunt, defrauded and bilked of all thejoys of life which fifty-two years' service in the world has earned, withnothing but the horrors of the workhouse before her, was very rationaland level-headed when she elected to jump into the canal. And I dare toassert, further, that the jury had done a wiser thing to bring in averdict charging society with temporary insanity for allowing EllenHughes Hunt to be defrauded and bilked of all the joys of life whichfifty-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 theirbacks shelter themselves, and evade the responsibility of their brothersand sisters, empty of belly and without whole shirts on their backs. 

From one issue of the _Observer_, an East End paper, I quote thefollowing 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 Isay that all people who do not commit suicide are sane. Insecurity offood and shelter, by the way, is a great cause of insanity among theliving. Costermongers, hawkers, and pedlars, a class of workers who livefrom hand to mouth more than those of any other class, form the highestpercentage 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 goinsane; and of farmers and graziers, only 5. 1. So a coster is twice aslikely to lose his reason as a soldier, and five times as likely as afarmer. 

Misfortune and misery are very potent in turning people's heads, anddrive one person to the lunatic asylum, and another to the morgue or thegallows. When the thing happens, and the father and husband, for all ofhis love for wife and children and his willingness to work, can get nowork to do, it is a simple matter for his reason to totter and the lightwithin his brain go out. And it is especially simple when it is takeninto consideration that his body is ravaged by innutrition and disease, in addition to his soul being torn by the sight of his suffering wife andlittle ones. 

"He is a good-looking man, with a mass of black hair, dark, expressiveeyes, delicately chiselled nose and chin, and wavy, fair moustache. " Thisis the reporter's description of Frank Cavilla as he stood in court, thisdreary month of September, "dressed in a much worn grey suit, and wearingno collar. "

Frank Cavilla lived and worked as a house decorator in London. He isdescribed as a good workman, a steady fellow, and not given to drink, while all his neighbours unite in testifying that he was a gentle andaffectionate husband and father. 

His wife, Hannah Cavilla, was a big, handsome, light-hearted woman. Shesaw to it that his children were sent neat and clean (the neighbours allremarked the fact) to the Childeric Road Board School. And so, with sucha man, so blessed, working steadily and living temperately, all wentwell, and the goose hung high. 

Then the thing happened. He worked for a Mr. Beck, builder, and lived inone of his master's houses in Trundley Road. Mr. Beck was thrown fromhis trap and killed. The thing was an unruly horse, and, as I say, ithappened. Cavilla had to seek fresh employment and find another house. 

This occurred eighteen months ago. For eighteen months he fought the bigfight. He got rooms in a little house in Batavia Road, but could notmake both ends meet. Steady work could not be obtained. He struggledmanfully at casual employment of all sorts, his wife and four childrenstarving before his eyes. He starved himself, and grew weak, and fellill. This was three months ago, and then there was absolutely no food atall. They made no complaint, spoke no word; but poor folk know. Thehousewives of Batavia Road sent them food, but so respectable were theCavillas that the food was sent anonymously, mysteriously, so as not tohurt their pride. 

The thing had happened. He had fought, and starved, and suffered foreighteen months. He got up one September morning, early. He opened hispocket-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 cutthe throat of his son, Walter, aged eight. He cut the throat of hisdaughter, Nellie, aged four. He cut the throat of his youngest-born, Ernest, aged sixteen months. Then he watched beside the dead all dayuntil the evening, when the police came, and he told them to put a pennyin 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, andwearing no collar. He was a good-looking man, with a mass of black hair, dark, expressive eyes, delicately chiselled nose and chin, and wavy, fairmoustache. 

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 thechildren dancing in the street when the organ-grinder goes his round. Itis fascinating to watch them, the new-born, the next generation, swayingand stepping, with pretty little mimicries and graceful inventions alltheir own, with muscles that move swiftly and easily, and bodies thatleap airily, weaving rhythms never taught in dancing school. 

I have talked with these children, here, there, and everywhere, and theystruck me as being bright as other children, and in many ways evenbrighter. They have most active little imaginations. Their capacity forprojecting themselves into the realm of romance and fantasy isremarkable. A joyous life is romping in their blood. They delight inmusic, and motion, and colour, and very often they betray a startlingbeauty of face and form under their filth and rags. 

But there is a Pied Piper of London Town who steals them all away. Theydisappear. One never sees them again, or anything that suggests them. You may look for them in vain amongst the generation of grown-ups. Hereyou will find stunted forms, ugly faces, and blunt and stolid minds. Grace, beauty, imagination, all the resiliency of mind and muscle, aregone. Sometimes, however, you may see a woman, not necessarily old, buttwisted and deformed out of all womanhood, bloated and drunken, lift herdraggled skirts and execute a few grotesque and lumbering steps upon thepavement. It is a hint that she was once one of those children whodanced to the organ-grinder. Those grotesque and lumbering steps are allthat is left of the promise of childhood. In the befogged recesses ofher brain has arisen a fleeting memory that she was once a girl. Thecrowd closes in. Little girls are dancing beside her, about her, withall the pretty graces she dimly recollects, but can no more than parodywith her body. Then she pants for breath, exhausted, and stumbles outthrough the circle. But the little girls dance on. 

The children of the Ghetto possess all the qualities which make for noblemanhood and womanhood; but the Ghetto itself, like an infuriated tigressturning on its young, turns upon and destroys all these qualities, blotsout the light and laughter, and moulds those it does not kill into soddenand forlorn creatures, uncouth, degraded, and wretched below the beastsof the field. 

As to the manner in which this is done, I have in previous chaptersdescribed it at length; here let Professor Huxley describe it in brief:-

"Any one who is acquainted with the state of the population of all greatindustrial centres, whether in this or other countries, is aware thatamidst a large and increasing body of that population there reignssupreme . . . That condition which the French call _la misere_, a wordfor which I do not think there is any exact English equivalent. It is acondition in which the food, warmth, and clothing which are necessary forthe mere maintenance of the functions of the body in their normal statecannot be obtained; in which men, women, and children are forced to crowdinto dens wherein decency is abolished, and the most ordinary conditionsof healthful existence are impossible of attainment; in which thepleasures within reach are reduced to brutality and drunkenness; in whichthe pains accumulate at compound interest in the shape of starvation, disease, stunted development, and moral degradation; in which theprospect of even steady and honest industry is a life of unsuccessfulbattling with hunger, rounded by a pauper's grave. "

In such conditions, the outlook for children is hopeless. They die likeflies, and those that survive, survive because they possess excessivevitality and a capacity of adaptation to the degradation with which theyare surrounded. They have no home life. In the dens and lairs in whichthey live they are exposed to all that is obscene and indecent. And astheir minds are made rotten, so are their bodies made rotten by badsanitation, overcrowding, and underfeeding. When a father and motherlive with three or four children in a room where the children take turnabout in sitting up to drive the rats away from the sleepers, when thosechildren never have enough to eat and are preyed upon and made miserableand weak by swarming vermin, the sort of men and women the survivors willmake 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. Theirincome does not increase with the years, though their family does, andthe man is exceedingly lucky if he can keep his health and his job. Ababy comes, and then another. This means that more room should beobtained; but these little mouths and bodies mean additional expense andmake it absolutely impossible to get more spacious quarters. More babiescome. There is not room in which to turn around. The youngsters run thestreets, and by the time they are twelve or fourteen the room-issue comesto a head, and out they go on the streets for good. The boy, if he belucky, can manage to make the common lodging-houses, and he may have anyone of several ends. But the girl of fourteen or fifteen, forced in thismanner to leave the one room called home, and able to earn at the best apaltry five or six shillings per week, can have but one end. And thebitter end of that one end is such as that of the woman whose body thepolice found this morning in a doorway in Dorset Street, Whitechapel. Homeless, shelterless, sick, with no one with her in her last hour, shehad died in the night of exposure. She was sixty-two years old and amatch vendor. She died as a wild animal dies. 

Fresh in my mind is the picture of a boy in the dock of an East Endpolice court. His head was barely visible above the railing. He wasbeing proved guilty of stealing two shillings from a woman, which he hadspent, 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 ahurt 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'sreply. 

The magistrate knitted his brows and accepted the rebuke. Nobody knewthe boy, nor his father or mother. He was without beginning orantecedent, a waif, a stray, a young cub seeking his food in the jungleof 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 sendthem away on a day's outing to the country, believe that not very manychildren 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 spentmust not be undervalued. Whatever the circumstances, the children learnthe meaning of fields and woods, so that descriptions of country sceneryin the books they read, which before conveyed no impression, become nowintelligible. "

One day in the fields and woods, if they are lucky enough to be picked upby the people who try to help! And they are being born faster every daythan they can be carted off to the fields and woods for the one day intheir lives. One day! In all their lives, one day! And for the rest ofthe days, as the boy told a certain bishop, "At ten we 'ops the wag; atthirteen we nicks things; an' at sixteen we bashes the copper. " Which isto say, at ten they play truant, at thirteen steal, and at sixteen aresufficiently developed hooligans to smash the policemen. 

The Rev. J. Cartmel Robinson tells of a boy and girl of his parish whoset 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 downat last, faint and despairing, and were rescued by a kind woman whobrought them back. Evidently they had been overlooked by the people whotry to help. 

The same gentleman is authority for the statement that in a street inHoxton (a district of the vast East End), over seven hundred children, between five and thirteen years, live in eighty small houses. And headds: "It is because London has largely shut her children in a maze ofstreets and houses and robbed them of their rightful inheritance in skyand field and brook, that they grow up to be men and women physicallyunfit. "

He tells of a member of his congregation who let a basement room to amarried couple. "They said they had two children; when they gotpossession it turned out that they had four. After a while a fifthappeared, and the landlord gave them notice to quit. They paid noattention to it. Then the sanitary inspector who has to wink at the lawso often, came in and threatened my friend with legal proceedings. Hepleaded that he could not get them out. They pleaded that nobody wouldhave them with so many children at a rental within their means, which isone of the commonest complaints of the poor, by-the-bye. What was to bedone? The landlord was between two millstones. Finally he applied tothe magistrate, who sent up an officer to inquire into the case. Sincethat 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 foundtwo young children. They were arrested and charged with being inmatesthe same as the women had been. Their father appeared at the trial. Hestated that himself and wife and two older children, besides the two inthe dock, occupied that room; he stated also that he occupied it becausehe could get no other room for the half-crown a week he paid for it. Themagistrate discharged the two juvenile offenders and warned the fatherthat he was bringing his children up unhealthily. 

But there is no need further to multiply instances. In London theslaughter of the innocents goes on on a scale more stupendous than anybefore in the history of the world. And equally stupendous is thecallousness of the people who believe in Christ, acknowledge God, and goto church regularly on Sunday. For the rest of the week they riot abouton the rents and profits which come to them from the East End stainedwith the blood of the children. Also, at times, so peculiarly are theymade, they will take half a million of these rents and profits and sendit 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 toWhitechapel, and still continuing south, down Leman Street to the docks. And as I walked I smiled at the East End papers, which, filled with civicpride, boastfully proclaim that there is nothing the matter with the EastEnd as a living place for men and women. 

It is rather hard to tell a tithe of what I saw. Much of it isuntenable. But in a general way I may say that I saw a nightmare, afearful slime that quickened the pavement with life, a mess ofunmentionable obscenity that put into eclipse the "nightly horror" ofPiccadilly and the Strand. It _was_ a menagerie of garmented bipeds thatlooked something like humans and more like beasts, and to complete thepicture, brass-buttoned keepers kept order among them when they snarledtoo 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 thatprowled up and down. At times, between keepers, these males looked at mesharply, hungrily, gutter-wolves that they were, and I was afraid oftheir hands, of their naked hands, as one may be afraid of the paws of agorilla. They reminded me of gorillas. Their bodies were small, ill-shaped, and squat. There were no swelling muscles, no abundant thews andwide-spreading shoulders. They exhibited, rather, an elemental economyof nature, such as the cave-men must have exhibited. But there wasstrength in those meagre bodies, the ferocious, primordial strength toclutch and gripe and tear and rend. When they spring upon their humanprey they are known even to bend the victim backward and double its bodytill the back is broken. They possess neither conscience nor sentiment, and they will kill for a half-sovereign, without fear or favour, if theyare given but half a chance. They are a new species, a breed of citysavages. The streets and houses, alleys and courts, are their huntinggrounds. As valley and mountain are to the natural savage, street andbuilding are valley and mountain to them. The slum is their jungle, andthey live and prey in the jungle. 

The dear soft people of the golden theatres and wonder-mansions of theWest End do not see these creatures, do not dream that they exist. Butthey 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 areon the firing line! For on that day they will crawl out of their densand lairs, and the people of the West End will see them, as the dear softaristocrats of Feudal France saw them and asked one another, "Whence camethey?" "Are they men?"

But they were not the only beasts that ranged the menagerie. They wereonly here and there, lurking in dark courts and passing like grey shadowsalong the walls; but the women from whose rotten loins they spring wereeverywhere. They whined insolently, and in maudlin tones begged me forpennies, and worse. They held carouse in every boozing ken, slatternly, unkempt, bleary-eyed, and towsled, leering and gibbering, overspillingwith foulness and corruption, and, gone in debauch, sprawling acrossbenches and bars, unspeakably repulsive, fearful to look upon. 

And there were others, strange, weird faces and forms and twistedmonstrosities that shouldered me on every side, inconceivable types ofsodden ugliness, the wrecks of society, the perambulating carcasses, theliving deaths--women, blasted by disease and drink till their shamebrought not tuppence in the open mart; and men, in fantastic rags, wrenched by hardship and exposure out of all semblance of men, theirfaces in a perpetual writhe of pain, grinning idiotically, shambling likeapes, dying with every step they took and each breath they drew. Andthere were young girls, of eighteen and twenty, with trim bodies andfaces yet untouched with twist and bloat, who had fetched the bottom ofthe 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 ofthem, who sat upon the pavement with their backs against a railing andwatched it all. 

The unfit and the unneeded! Industry does not clamour for them. Thereare no jobs going begging through lack of men and women. The dockerscrowd at the entrance gate, and curse and turn away when the foreman doesnot give them a call. The engineers who have work pay six shillings aweek to their brother engineers who can find nothing to do; 514, 000textile workers oppose a resolution condemning the employment of childrenunder fifteen. Women, and plenty to spare, are found to toil under thesweat-shop masters for tenpence a day of fourteen hours. Alfred Freemancrawls to muddy death because he loses his job. Ellen Hughes Huntprefers Regent's Canal to Islington Workhouse. Frank Cavilla cuts thethroats of his wife and children because he cannot find work enough togive 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 theprostitution of men and women and children, of flesh and blood, andsparkle and spirit; in brief, the prostitution of labour. If this is thebest that civilisation can do for the human, then give us howling andnaked 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 machineand 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 physicaldevelopment. 

"Look at my scrawny arm, will you. " He pulled up his sleeve. "Notenough to eat, that's what's the matter with it. Oh, not now. I havewhat I want to eat these days. But it's too late. It can't make up forwhat I didn't have to eat when I was a kiddy. Dad came up to London fromthe Fen Country. Mother died, and there were six of us kiddies and dadliving in two small rooms. 

"He had hard times, dad did. He might have chucked us, but he didn't. Heslaved all day, and at night he came home and cooked and cared for us. Hewas father and mother, both. He did his best, but we didn't have enoughto eat. We rarely saw meat, and then of the worst. And it is not goodfor 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 mydad. It was starved out of me. In a couple of generations there'll beno more of me here in London. Yet there's my younger brother; he'sbigger 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 weakerand weaker. "

"Not when they hold together, " he replied. "Whenever you come along inthe 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 isthe youngest in the family, or at least is one of the younger. The wayof it is this: the older children starve more than the younger ones. Bythe time the younger ones come along, the older ones are starting towork, and there is more money coming in, and more food to go around. "

He pulled down his sleeve, a concrete instance of where chronicsemi-starvation kills not, but stunts. His voice was but one among themyriads that raise the cry of the hunger wail in the greatest empire inthe 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, 000people receive less than 12 pounds per month, per family; and a constantarmy of 8, 000, 000 lives on the border of starvation. 

A committee of the London County school board makes this declaration: "Attimes, _when there is no special distress_, 55, 000 children in a state ofhunger, which makes it useless to attempt to teach them, are in theschools of London alone. " The italics are mine. "When there is nospecial distress" means good times in England; for the people of Englandhave come to look upon starvation and suffering, which they call"distress, " as part of the social order. Chronic starvation is lookedupon as a matter of course. It is only when acute starvation makes itsappearance 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 Endshop at the close of a murky day. He had been the eldest of fivechildren, with a mother and no father. Being the eldest, he had starvedand worked as a child to put bread into the mouths of his little brothersand sisters. Not once in three months did he ever taste meat. He neverknew what it was to have his hunger thoroughly appeased. And he claimedthat this chronic starvation of his childhood had robbed him of hissight. To support the claim, he quoted from the report of the RoyalCommission 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 bitternessof an afflicted man to whom society did not give enough to eat. He wasone of an enormous army of blind in London, and he said that in the blindhomes they did not receive half enough to eat. He gave the diet for aday:-

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. Thefood that is given to it consists of a piece of usually bad-baked prisonbread and a tin of water for breakfast at half-past seven. At twelveo'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 ofwater for its supper. This diet in the case of a strong grown man isalways productive of illness of some kind, chiefly of course diarrhoea, with its attendant weakness. In fact, in a big prison astringentmedicines 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 thefood at all. Any one who knows anything about children knows how easilya child's digestion is upset by a fit of crying, or trouble and mentaldistress of any kind. A child who has been crying all day long, andperhaps half the night, in a lonely dim-lit cell, and is preyed upon byterror, simply cannot eat food of this coarse, horrible kind. In thecase of the little child to whom Warder Martin gave the biscuits, thechild was crying with hunger on Tuesday morning, and utterly unable toeat the bread and water served to it for its breakfast. Martin went outafter the breakfasts had been served and bought the few sweet biscuitsfor the child rather than see it starving. It was a beautiful action onhis part, and was so recognised by the child, who, utterly unconscious ofthe regulations of the Prison Board, told one of the senior wardens howkind this junior warden had been to him. The result was, of course, areport and a dismissal. "

Robert Blatchford compares the workhouse pauper's daily diet with thesoldier's, which, when he was a soldier, was not considered liberalenough, and yet is twice as liberal as the pauper's. 

PAUPER DIET SOLDIER3. 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, andthe paupers "have nearly all that pallid, pasty complexion which is thesure mark of starvation. "

Here is a table, comparing the workhouse officer's weekly allowance:-

OFFICER DIET PAUPER7 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 liberalthan the pauper's; but evidently it is not considered liberal enough, fora footnote is added to the officer's table saying that 'a cash payment oftwo shillings and sixpence a week is also made to each resident officerand servant. ' If the pauper has ample food, why does the officer havemore? And if the officer has not too much, can the pauper be properlyfed on less than half the amount?"

But it is not alone the Ghetto-dweller, the prisoner, and the pauper thatstarve. Hodge, of the country, does not know what it is always to have afull belly. In truth, it is his empty belly which has driven him to thecity in such great numbers. Let us investigate the way of living of alabourer from a parish in the Bradfield Poor Law Union, Berks. Supposinghim to have two children, steady work, a rent-free cottage, and anaverage weekly wage of thirteen shillings, which is equivalent to $3. 25, then here is his weekly budget:-

 s. D. Bread (5 quarterns) 1 10Flour (0. 5 gallon) 0 4Tea (0. 25 lb. ) 0 6Butter (1 lb. ) 1 3Lard (1 lb. ) 0 6Sugar (6 lb. ) 1 0Bacon or other meat (about 0. 25 lb. ) 2 8Cheese (1 lb. ) 0 8Milk (half-tin condensed) 0 3. 25Coal 1 6Beer noneTobacco noneInsurance ("Prudential") 0 3Labourers' Union 0 1Wood, tools, dispensary, &c. 0 6Insurance ("Foresters") and margin 1 1. 75 for clothesTotal 13 0

The guardians of the workhouse in the above Union pride themselves ontheir rigid economy. It costs per pauper per week:-

 s. D. Men 6 1. 5Women 5 6. 5Children 5 1. 25

If the labourer whose budget has been described should quit his toil andgo into the workhouse, he would cost the guardians for

 s. D. Himself 6 1. 5Wife 5 6. 5Two children 10 2. 5Total 21 10. 5Or roughly, $5. 46

It would require more than a guinea for the workhouse to care for him andhis family, which he, somehow, manages to do on thirteen shillings. Andin addition, it is an understood fact that it is cheaper to cater for alarge number of people--buying, cooking, and serving wholesale--than itis to cater for a small number of people, say a family. 

Nevertheless, at the time this budget was compiled, there was in thatparish another family, not of four, but eleven persons, who had to liveon an income, not of thirteen shillings, but of twelve shillings per week(eleven shillings in winter), and which had, not a rent-free cottage, buta cottage for which it paid three shillings per week. 

This must be understood, and understood clearly: _Whatever is true ofLondon 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 theUnited Kingdom an inferno. The argument that the decentralisation ofLondon would ameliorate conditions is a vain thing and false. If the6, 000, 000 people of London were separated into one hundred cities eachwith a population of 60, 000, misery would be decentralised but notdiminished. The sum of it would remain as large. 

In this instance, Mr. B. S. Rowntree, by an exhaustive analysis, hasproved for the country town what Mr. Charles Booth has proved for themetropolis, that fully one-fourth of the dwellers are condemned to apoverty which destroys them physically and spiritually; that fully one-fourth of the dwellers do not have enough to eat, are inadequatelyclothed, sheltered, and warmed in a rigorous climate, and are doomed to amoral degeneracy which puts them lower than the savage in cleanliness anddecency. 

After listening to the wail of an old Irish peasant in Kerry, RobertBlatchford asked him what he wanted. "The old man leaned upon his spadeand looked out across the black peat fields at the lowering skies. 'Whatis it that I'm wantun?' he said; then in a deep plaintive tone hecontinued, more to himself than to me, 'All our brave bhoys and deargurrls 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 theDay av Judgment_. '"

The Day of Judgment! More than he want it. From all the land rises thehunger wail, from Ghetto and countryside, from prison and casual ward, from asylum and workhouse--the cry of the people who have not enough toeat. Millions of people, men, women, children, little babes, the blind, the deaf, the halt, the sick, vagabonds and toilers, prisoners andpaupers, the people of Ireland, England, Scotland, Wales, who have notenough to eat. And this, in face of the fact that five men can producebread for a thousand; that one workman can produce cotton cloth for 250people, woollens for 300, and boots and shoes for 1000. It would seemthat 40, 000, 000 people are keeping a big house, and that they are keepingit badly. The income is all right, but there is something criminallywrong with the management. And who dares to say that it is notcriminally mismanaged, this big house, when five men can produce breadfor 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 aremade dull and sodden by it. Their efficiency is sadly impaired, and theylose whatever imagination, invention, and quickness may be theirs byright of race. It may hardly be called an acquired habit, for they areaccustomed to it from their earliest infancy. Children are begotten indrunkenness, saturated in drink before they draw their first breath, bornto the smell and taste of it, and brought up in the midst of it. 

The public-house is ubiquitous. It flourishes on every corner andbetween 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 andmothers are ready to go home, sipping from the glasses of their elders, listening to the coarse language and degrading conversation, catching thecontagion of it, familiarising themselves with licentiousness anddebauchery. 

Mrs. Grundy rules as supremely over the workers as she does over thebourgeoisie; but in the case of the workers, the one thing she does notfrown upon is the public-house. No disgrace or shame attaches to it, norto 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 whenin a public-'ouse. " She was a young and pretty waitress, and she waslaying down to another waitress her pre-eminent respectability anddiscretion. Mrs. Grundy drew the line at spirits, but allowed that itwas quite proper for a clean young girl to drink beer, and to go into apublic-house to drink it. 

Not only is this beer unfit for the people to drink, but too often themen and women are unfit to drink it. On the other hand, it is their veryunfitness that drives them to drink it. Ill-fed, suffering frominnutrition and the evil effects of overcrowding and squalor, theirconstitutions develop a morbid craving for the drink, just as the sicklystomach of the overstrung Manchester factory operative hankers afterexcessive quantities of pickles and similar weird foods. Unhealthyworking and living engenders unhealthy appetites and desires. Man cannotbe worked worse than a horse is worked, and be housed and fed as a pig ishoused and fed, and at the same time have clean and wholesome ideals andaspirations. 

As home-life vanishes, the public-house appears. Not only do men andwomen abnormally crave drink, who are overworked, exhausted, sufferingfrom deranged stomachs and bad sanitation, and deadened by the uglinessand monotony of existence, but the gregarious men and women who have nohome-life flee to the bright and clattering public-house in a vainattempt to express their gregariousness. And when a family is housed inone small room, home-life is impossible. 

A brief examination of such a dwelling will serve to bring to light oneimportant cause of drunkenness. Here the family arises in the morning, dresses, and makes its toilet, father, mother, sons, and daughters, andin the same room, shoulder to shoulder (for the room is small), the wifeand mother cooks the breakfast. And in the same room, heavy andsickening with the exhalations of their packed bodies throughout thenight, that breakfast is eaten. The father goes to work, the elderchildren go to school or into the street, and the mother remains with hercrawling, toddling youngsters to do her housework--still in the sameroom. Here she washes the clothes, filling the pent space with soapsudsand the smell of dirty clothes, and overhead she hangs the wet linen todry. 

Here, in the evening, amid the manifold smells of the day, the familygoes to its virtuous couch. That is to say, as many as possible pileinto the one bed (if bed they have), and the surplus turns in on thefloor. And this is the round of their existence, month after month, yearafter 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 percent. Of the East End children die before they are five years old, thebody is laid out in the same room. And if they are very poor, it is keptfor 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 thetable, from which, in the morning, when the dead is put back into thebed, they eat their breakfast. Sometimes the body is placed on the shelfwhich serves as a pantry for their food. Only a couple of weeks ago, anEast End woman was in trouble, because, in this fashion, being unable tobury it, she had kept her dead child three weeks. 

Now such a room as I have described is not home but horror; and the menand women who flee away from it to the public-house are to be pitied, notblamed. There are 300, 000 people, in London, divided into families thatlive in single rooms, while there are 900, 000 who are illegally housedaccording to the Public Health Act of 1891--a respectablerecruiting-ground for the drink traffic. 

Then there are the insecurity of happiness, the precariousness ofexistence, the well-founded fear of the future--potent factors in drivingpeople 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 canbring. It even exalts them, and makes them feel that they are finer andbetter, though at the same time it drags them down and makes them morebeastly than ever. For the unfortunate man or woman, it is a racebetween 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 maypreach their hearts out over the evils of drink, but until the evils thatcause people to drink are abolished, drink and its evils will remain. 

Until the people who try to help realise this, their well-intentionedefforts will be futile, and they will present a spectacle fit only to setOlympus laughing. I have gone through an exhibition of Japanese art, gotup for the poor of Whitechapel with the idea of elevating them, ofbegetting 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 yearnafter the Beautiful and True and Good, the foul facts of their existenceand 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 anadded curse to them. They will have so much more to forget than if theyhad never known and yearned. Did Destiny to-day bind me down to the lifeof an East End slave for the rest of my years, and did Destiny grant mebut one wish, I should ask that I might forget all about the Beautifuland True and Good; that I might forget all I had learned from the openbooks, and forget the people I had known, the things I had heard, and thelands I had seen. And if Destiny didn't grant it, I am pretty confidentthat 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 theycannot 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 Endas teachers and savants. They do not understand the simple sociology ofChrist, yet they come to the miserable and the despised with the pomp ofsocial redeemers. They have worked faithfully, but beyond relieving aninfinitesimal fraction of misery and collecting a certain amount of datawhich might otherwise have been more scientifically and less expensivelycollected, they have achieved nothing. 

As some one has said, they do everything for the poor except get offtheir backs. The very money they dribble out in their child's schemeshas been wrung from the poor. They come from a race of successful andpredatory bipeds who stand between the worker and his wages, and they tryto 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 womenworkers, in which, for instance, a child is taken while the mother makesviolets in Islington at three farthings a gross, when more children andviolet-makers than they can cope with are being born right along? Thisviolet-maker handles each flower four times, 576 handlings for threefarthings, and in the day she handles the flowers 6912 times for a wageof ninepence. She is being robbed. Somebody is on her back, and ayearning 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 themother, undoes at night, when the child comes home, all that they havedone for the child in the day. 

And one and all, they join in teaching a fundamental lie. They do notknow 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. Inovercrowded London, the struggle for a chance to work is keen, andbecause 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 otherwords, to live on less. This is equivalent to a lowering of the standardof living. In the competition for a chance to work, the man with a lowerstandard of living will underbid the man with a higher standard. And asmall group of such thrifty workers in any overcrowded industry willpermanently lower the wages of that industry. And the thrifty ones willno longer be thrifty, for their income will have been reduced till itbalances their expenditure. 

In short, thrift negates thrift. If every worker in England should heedthe preachers of thrift and cut expenditure in half, the condition ofthere being more men to work than there is work to do would swiftly cutwages in half. And then none of the workers of England would be thrifty, for they would be living up to their diminished incomes. Theshort-sighted thrift-preachers would naturally be astounded at theoutcome. The measure of their failure would be precisely the measure ofthe success of their propaganda. And, anyway, it is sheer bosh andnonsense to preach thrift to the 1, 800, 000 London workers who are dividedinto families which have a total income of less than 21s. Per week, onequarter to one half of which must be paid for rent. 

Concerning the futility of the people who try to help, I wish to make onenotable, noble exception, namely, the Dr. Barnardo Homes. Dr. Barnardois a child-catcher. First, he catches them when they are young, beforethey are set, hardened, in the vicious social mould; and then he sendsthem away to grow up and be formed in another and better social mould. Upto date he has sent out of the country 13, 340 boys, most of them toCanada, and not one in fifty has failed. A splendid record, when it isconsidered that these lads are waifs and strays, homeless and parentless, jerked out from the very bottom of the Abyss, and forty-nine out of fiftyof them made into men. 

Every twenty-four hours in the year Dr. Barnardo snatches nine waifs fromthe 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 notplay with palliatives. He traces social viciousness and misery to theirsources. He removes the progeny of the gutter-folk from theirpestilential environment, and gives them a healthy, wholesome environmentin which to be pressed and prodded and moulded into men. 

When the people who try to help cease their playing and dabbling with daynurseries and Japanese art exhibits and go back and learn their West Endand the sociology of Christ, they will be in better shape to buckle downto the work they ought to be doing in the world. And if they do buckledown to the work, they will follow Dr. Barnardo's lead, only on a scaleas large as the nation is large. They won't cram yearnings for theBeautiful, and True, and Good down the throat of the woman making violetsfor three farthings a gross, but they will make somebody get off her backand quit cramming himself till, like the Romans, he must go to a bath andsweat it out. And to their consternation, they will find that they willhave to get off that woman's back themselves, as well as the backs of afew 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 itswidest aspect, and to put certain questions to Civilisation, by theanswers to which Civilisation must stand or fall. For instance, hasCivilisation bettered the lot of man? "Man, " I use in its democraticsense, meaning the average man. So the question re-shapes itself: _HasCivilisation bettered the lot of the average man_?

Let us see. In Alaska, along the banks of the Yukon River, near itsmouth, live the Innuit folk. They are a very primitive people, manifesting but mere glimmering adumbrations of that tremendous artifice, Civilisation. Their capital amounts possibly to 2 pounds per head. Theyhunt and fish for their food with bone-headed spews and arrows. Theynever suffer from lack of shelter. Their clothes, largely made from theskins 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 thesummer they live in tents, open to every breeze and cool. They arehealthy, and strong, and happy. Their one problem is food. They havetheir times of plenty and times of famine. In good times they feast; inbad times they die of starvation. But starvation, as a chroniccondition, present with a large number of them all the time, is a thingunknown. Further, they have no debts. 

In the United Kingdom, on the rim of the Western Ocean, live the Englishfolk. They are a consummately civilised people. Their capital amountsto at least 300 pounds per head. They gain their food, not by huntingand fishing, but by toil at colossal artifices. For the most part, theysuffer from lack of shelter. The greater number of them are vilelyhoused, do not have enough fuel to keep them warm, and are insufficientlyclothed. A constant number never have any houses at all, and sleepshelterless under the stars. Many are to be found, winter and summer, shivering on the streets in their rags. They have good times and bad. Ingood times most of them manage to get enough to eat, in bad times theydie of starvation. They are dying now, they were dying yesterday andlast year, they will die to-morrow and next year, of starvation; forthey, 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 ofthem die in poverty, while a constant army of 8, 000, 000 struggles on theragged edge of starvation. Further, each babe that is born, is born indebt to the sum of 22 pounds. This is because of an artifice called theNational Debt. 

In a fair comparison of the average Innuit and the average Englishman, itwill be seen that life is less rigorous for the Innuit; that while theInnuit suffers only during bad times from starvation, the Englishmansuffers during good times as well; that no Innuit lacks fuel, clothing, or housing, while the Englishman is in perpetual lack of these threeessentials. In this connection it is well to instance the judgment of aman such as Huxley. From the knowledge gained as a medical officer inthe East End of London, and as a scientist pursuing investigations amongthe most elemental savages, he concludes, "Were the alternative presentedto me, I would deliberately prefer the life of the savage to that ofthose people of Christian London. "

The creature comforts man enjoys are the products of man's labour. SinceCivilisation has failed to give the average Englishman food and shelterequal to that enjoyed by the Innuit, the question arises: _HasCivilisation increased the producing power of the average man_? If ithas not increased man's producing power, then Civilisation cannot stand. 

But, it will be instantly admitted, Civilisation has increased man'sproducing power. Five men can produce bread for a thousand. One man canproduce cotton cloth for 250 people, woollens for 300, and boots andshoes for 1000. Yet it has been shown throughout the pages of this bookthat English folk by the millions do not receive enough food, clothes, and boots. Then arises the third and inexorable question: _IfCivilisation has increased the producing power of the average man, whyhas it not bettered the lot of the average man_?

There can be one answer only--MISMANAGEMENT. Civilisation has madepossible all manner of creature comforts and heart's delights. In thesethe average Englishman does not participate. If he shall be foreverunable to participate, then Civilisation falls. There is no reason forthe continued existence of an artifice so avowed a failure. But it isimpossible that men should have reared this tremendous artifice in vain. It stuns the intellect. To acknowledge so crushing a defeat is to givethe death-blow to striving and progress. 

One other alternative, and one other only, presents itself. _Civilisationmust be compelled to better the lot of the average men_. This accepted, it becomes at once a question of business management. Things profitablemust be continued; things unprofitable must be eliminated. Either theEmpire is a profit to England, or it is a loss. If it is a loss, it mustbe done away with. If it is a profit, it must be managed so that theaverage man comes in for a share of the profit. 

If the struggle for commercial supremacy is profitable, continue it. Ifit is not, if it hurts the worker and makes his lot worse than the lot ofa savage, then fling foreign markets and industrial empire overboard. Forit is a patent fact that if 40, 000, 000 people, aided by Civilisation, possess a greater individual producing power than the Innuit, then those40, 000, 000 people should enjoy more creature comforts and heart'sdelights than the Innuits enjoy. 

If the 400, 000 English gentlemen, "of no occupation, " according to theirown statement in the Census of 1881, are unprofitable, do away with them. Set them to work ploughing game preserves and planting potatoes. If theyare profitable, continue them by all means, but let it be seen to thatthe average Englishman shares somewhat in the profits they produce byworking at no occupation. 

In short, society must be reorganised, and a capable management put atthe head. That the present management is incapable, there can be nodiscussion. It has drained the United Kingdom of its life-blood. It hasenfeebled the stay-at-home folk till they are unable longer to strugglein the van of the competing nations. It has built up a West End and anEast End as large as the Kingdom is large, in which one end is riotousand 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 theEnglish-speaking people of the world outside of the United States. Noris this charged in a pessimistic spirit. Blood empire is greater thanpolitical empire, and the English of the New World and the Antipodes arestrong and vigorous as ever. But the political empire under which theyare nominally assembled is perishing. The political machine known as theBritish Empire is running down. In the hands of its management it islosing momentum every day. 

It is inevitable that this management, which has grossly and criminallymismanaged, shall be swept away. Not only has it been wasteful andinefficient, but it has misappropriated the funds. Every worn-out, pasty-faced pauper, every blind man, every prison babe, every man, woman, andchild whose belly is gnawing with hunger pangs, is hungry because thefunds have been misappropriated by the management. 

Nor can one member of this managing class plead not guilty before thejudgment bar of Man. "The living in their houses, and in their gravesthe dead, " are challenged by every babe that dies of innutrition, byevery girl that flees the sweater's den to the nightly promenade ofPiccadilly, by every worked-out toiler that plunges into the canal. Thefood this managing class eats, the wine it drinks, the shows it makes, and the fine clothes it wears, are challenged by eight million mouthswhich have never had enough to fill them, and by twice eight millionbodies which have never been sufficiently clothed and housed. 

There can be no mistake. Civilisation has increased man's producingpower an hundred-fold, and through mismanagement the men of Civilisationlive worse than the beasts, and have less to eat and wear and protectthem from the elements than the savage Innuit in a frigid climate wholives to-day as he lived in the stone age ten thousand years ago. 

CHALLENGE

I have a vague remembrance Of a story that is toldIn some ancient Spanish legend Or chronicle of old. 

It was when brave King Sanche Was before Zamora slain, And his great besieging army Lay encamped upon the plain. 

Don Diego de Ordenez Sallied forth in front of all, And shouted loud his challenge To the warders on the wall. 

All the people of Zamora, Both the born and the unborn, As traitors did he challenge With taunting words of scorn. 

The living in their houses, And in their graves the dead, And the waters in their rivers, And their wine, and oil, and bread. 

There is a greater army That besets us round with strife, A starving, numberless army At all the gates of life. 

The poverty-stricken millions Who challenge our wine and bread, And impeach us all as traitors, Both the living and the dead. 

And whenever I sit at the banquet, Where the feast and song are high, Amid the mirth and music I can hear that fearful cry. 

And hollow and haggard faces Look into the lighted hall, And wasted hands are extended To catch the crumbs that fall

And within there is light and plenty, And odours fill the air;But without there is cold and darkness, And hunger and despair. 

And there in the camp of famine, In wind, and cold, and rain, Christ, the great Lord of the Army, Lies dead upon the plain. 

LONGFELLOW

Footnotes:

{1} This in the Klondike. --J. L. 

{2} "Runt" in America is the equivalent of the English "crowl, " thedwarf of a litter. 

{3} The San Francisco bricklayer receives twenty shillings per day, andat present is on strike for twenty-four shillings.