THE PEOPLE OF THE ABYSS

by Jack London




The chief priests and rulers cry:-

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

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

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

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

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL.



PREFACE



The experiences related in this volume fell to me in the summer of
1902.  I went down into the under-world of London with an attitude
of mind which I may best liken to that of the explorer.  I was open
to be convinced by the evidence of my eyes, rather than by the
teachings of those who had not seen, or by the words of those who
had seen and gone before.  Further, I took with me certain simple
criteria with which to measure the life of the under-world.  That
which made for more life, for physical and spiritual health, was
good; that which made for less life, which hurt, and dwarfed, and
distorted life, was bad.

It will be readily apparent to the reader that I saw much that was
bad.  Yet it must not be forgotten that the time of which I write
was considered "good times" in England.  The starvation and lack of
shelter I encountered constituted a chronic condition of misery
which is never wiped out, even in the periods of greatest
prosperity.

Following the summer in question came a hard winter.  Great numbers
of the unemployed formed into processions, as many as a dozen at a
time, and daily marched through the streets of London crying for
bread.  Mr. Justin McCarthy, writing in the month of January 1903,
to the New York Independent, briefly epitomises the situation as
follows:-


"The workhouses have no space left in which to pack the starving
crowds who are craving every day and night at their doors for food
and shelter.  All the charitable institutions have exhausted their
means in trying to raise supplies of food for the famishing
residents of the garrets and cellars of London lanes and alleys.
The quarters of the Salvation Army in various parts of London are
nightly besieged by hosts of the unemployed and the hungry for whom
neither shelter nor the means of sustenance can be provided."


It has been urged that the criticism I have passed on things as they
are in England is too pessimistic.  I must say, in extenuation, that
of optimists I am the most optimistic.  But I measure manhood less
by political aggregations than by individuals.  Society grows, while
political machines rack to pieces and become "scrap."  For the
English, so far as manhood and womanhood and health and happiness
go, I see a broad and smiling future.  But for a great deal of the
political machinery, which at present mismanages for them, I see
nothing else than the scrap heap.

JACK LONDON.
PIEDMONT, CALIFORNIA.




CHAPTER I--THE DESCENT



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

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

"You don't want to LIVE down there!" everybody said, with
disapprobation writ large upon their faces.  "Why, it is said there
are places where a man's life isn't worth tu'pence."

"The very places I wish to see," I broke in.

"But you can't, you know," was the unfailing rejoinder.

"Which is not what I came to see you about," I answered brusquely,
somewhat nettled by their incomprehension.  "I am a stranger here,
and I want you to tell me what you know of the East End, in order
that I may have something to start on."

"But we know nothing of the East End.  It is over there, somewhere."
And they waved their hands vaguely in the direction where the sun on
rare occasions may be seen to rise.

"Then I shall go to Cook's," I announced.

"Oh yes," they said, with relief.  "Cook's will be sure to know."

But O Cook, O Thomas Cook & Son, path-finders and trail-clearers,
living sign-posts to all the world, and bestowers of first aid to
bewildered travellers--unhesitatingly and instantly, with ease and
celerity, could you send me to Darkest Africa or Innermost Thibet,
but to the East End of London, barely a stone's throw distant from
Ludgate Circus, you know not the way!

"You can't do it, you know," said the human emporium of routes and
fares at Cook's Cheapside branch.  "It is so--hem--so unusual."

"Consult the police," he concluded authoritatively, when I had
persisted.  "We are not accustomed to taking travellers to the East
End; we receive no call to take them there, and we know nothing
whatsoever about the place at all."

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

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

He said it so cheerfully and cold-bloodedly that on the instant I
saw my stark and mutilated cadaver stretched upon a slab where cool
waters trickle ceaselessly, and him I saw bending over and sadly and
patiently identifying it as the body of the insane American who
WOULD see the East End.

"No, no," I answered; "merely to identify me in case I get into a
scrape with the 'bobbies.'"  This last I said with a thrill; truly,
I was gripping hold of the vernacular.

"That," he said, "is a matter for the consideration of the Chief
Office."

"It is so unprecedented, you know," he added apologetically.

The man at the Chief Office hemmed and hawed.  "We make it a rule,"
he explained, "to give no information concerning our clients."

"But in this case," I urged, "it is the client who requests you to
give the information concerning himself."

Again he hemmed and hawed.

"Of course," I hastily anticipated, "I know it is unprecedented,
but--"

"As I was about to remark," he went on steadily, "it is
unprecedented, and I don't think we can do anything for you."

However, I departed with the address of a detective who lived in the
East End, and took my way to the American consul-general.  And here,
at last, I found a man with whom I could "do business."  There was
no hemming and hawing, no lifted brows, open incredulity, or blank
amazement.  In one minute I explained myself and my project, which
he accepted as a matter of course.  In the second minute he asked my
age, height, and weight, and looked me over.  And in the third
minute, as we shook hands at parting, he said:  "All right, Jack.
I'll remember you and keep track."

I breathed a sigh of relief.  Having burnt my ships behind me, I was
now free to plunge into that human wilderness of which nobody seemed
to know anything.  But at once I encountered a new difficulty in the
shape of my cabby, a grey-whiskered and eminently decorous personage
who had imperturbably driven me for several hours about the "City."

"Drive me down to the East End," I ordered, taking my seat.

"Where, sir?" he demanded with frank surprise.

"To the East End, anywhere.  Go on."

The hansom pursued an aimless way for several minutes, then came to
a puzzled stop.  The aperture above my head was uncovered, and the
cabman peered down perplexedly at me.

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

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

"But wot's the haddress, sir?"

"See here!" I thundered.  "Drive me down to the East End, and at
once!"

It was evident that he did not understand, but he withdrew his head,
and grumblingly started his horse.

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

Not a hansom did I meet with in all my drive, while mine was like an
apparition from another and better world, the way the children ran
after it and alongside.  And as far as I could see were the solid
walls of brick, the slimy pavements, and the screaming streets; and
for the first time in my life the fear of the crowd smote me.  It
was like the fear of the sea; and the miserable multitudes, street
upon street, seemed so many waves of a vast and malodorous sea,
lapping about me and threatening to well up and over me.

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

I looked about.  It was really a railroad station, and he had driven
desperately to it as the one familiar spot he had ever heard of in
all that wilderness.

"Well," I said.

He spluttered unintelligibly, shook his head, and looked very
miserable.  "I'm a strynger 'ere," he managed to articulate.  "An'
if yer don't want Stepney Station, I'm blessed if I know wotcher do
want."

"I'll tell you what I want," I said.  "You drive along and keep your
eye out for a shop where old clothes are sold.  Now, when you see
such a shop, drive right on till you turn the corner, then stop and
let me out."

I could see that he was growing dubious of his fare, but not long
afterwards he pulled up to the curb and informed me that an old-
clothes shop was to be found a bit of the way back.

"Won'tcher py me?" he pleaded.  "There's seven an' six owin' me."

"Yes," I laughed, "and it would be the last I'd see of you."

"Lord lumme, but it'll be the last I see of you if yer don't py me,"
he retorted.

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

Here the chief difficulty was in making the shopman understand that
I really and truly wanted old clothes.  But after fruitless attempts
to press upon me new and impossible coats and trousers, he began to
bring to light heaps of old ones, looking mysterious the while and
hinting darkly.  This he did with the palpable intention of letting
me know that he had "piped my lay," in order to bulldose me, through
fear of exposure, into paying heavily for my purchases.  A man in
trouble, or a high-class criminal from across the water, was what he
took my measure for--in either case, a person anxious to avoid the
police.

But I disputed with him over the outrageous difference between
prices and values, till I quite disabused him of the notion, and he
settled down to drive a hard bargain with a hard customer.  In the
end I selected a pair of stout though well-worn trousers, a frayed
jacket with one remaining button, a pair of brogans which had
plainly seen service where coal was shovelled, a thin leather belt,
and a very dirty cloth cap.  My underclothing and socks, however,
were new and warm, but of the sort that any American waif, down in
his luck, could acquire in the ordinary course of events.

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

"How much will you give me for them?" I demanded suddenly.  "I paid
you ten bob for the lot, and I'll sell them back to you, right now,
for eight!  Come, it's a go!"

But he grinned and shook his head, and though I had made a good
bargain, I was unpleasantly aware that he had made a better one.

I found the cabby and a policeman with their heads together, but the
latter, after looking me over sharply, and particularly scrutinizing
the bundle under my arm, turned away and left the cabby to wax
mutinous by himself.  And not a step would he budge till I paid him
the seven shillings and sixpence owing him.  Whereupon he was
willing to drive me to the ends of the earth, apologising profusely
for his insistence, and explaining that one ran across queer
customers in London Town.

But he drove me only to Highbury Vale, in North London, where my
luggage was waiting for me.  Here, next day, I took off my shoes
(not without regret for their lightness and comfort), and my soft,
grey travelling suit, and, in fact, all my clothing; and proceeded
to array myself in the clothes of the other and unimaginable men,
who must have been indeed unfortunate to have had to part with such
rags for the pitiable sums obtainable from a dealer.

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

The remainder of my costume was fairly easy to put on, though the
brogans, or brogues, were quite a problem.  As stiff and hard as if
made of wood, it was only after a prolonged pounding of the uppers
with my fists that I was able to get my feet into them at all.
Then, with a few shillings, a knife, a handkerchief, and some brown
papers and flake tobacco stowed away in my pockets, I thumped down
the stairs and said good-bye to my foreboding friends.  As I paused
out of the door, the "help," a comely middle-aged woman, could not
conquer a grin that twisted her lips and separated them till the
throat, out of involuntary sympathy, made the uncouth animal noises
we are wont to designate as "laughter."

No sooner was I out on the streets than I was impressed by the
difference in status effected by my clothes.  All servility vanished
from the demeanour of the common people with whom I came in contact.
Presto! in the twinkling of an eye, so to say, I had become one of
them.  My frayed and out-at-elbows jacket was the badge and
advertisement of my class, which was their class.  It made me of
like kind, and in place of the fawning and too respectful attention
I had hitherto received, I now shared with them a comradeship.  The
man in corduroy and dirty neckerchief no longer addressed me as
"sir" or "governor."  It was "mate" now--and a fine and hearty word,
with a tingle to it, and a warmth and gladness, which the other term
does not possess.  Governor!  It smacks of mastery, and power, and
high authority--the tribute of the man who is under to the man on
top, delivered in the hope that he will let up a bit and ease his
weight, which is another way of saying that it is an appeal for
alms.

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

In my rags and tatters I escaped the pestilence of tipping, and
encountered men on a basis of equality.  Nay, before the day was out
I turned the tables, and said, most gratefully, "Thank you, sir," to
a gentleman whose horse I held, and who dropped a penny into my
eager palm

Other changes I discovered were wrought in my condition by my new
garb.  In crossing crowded thoroughfares I found I had to be, if
anything, more lively in avoiding vehicles, and it was strikingly
impressed upon me that my life had cheapened in direct ratio with my
clothes.  When before I inquired the way of a policeman, I was
usually asked, "Bus or 'ansom, sir?"  But now the query became,
"Walk or ride?"  Also, at the railway stations, a third-class ticket
was now shoved out to me as a matter of course.

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

And when at last I made into the East End, I was gratified to find
that the fear of the crowd no longer haunted me.  I had become a
part of it.  The vast and malodorous sea had welled up and over me,
or I had slipped gently into it, and there was nothing fearsome
about it--with the one exception of the stoker's singlet.



CHAPTER II--JOHNNY UPRIGHT



I shall not give you the address of Johnny Upright.  Let it suffice
that he lives in the most respectable street in the East End--a
street that would be considered very mean in America, but a
veritable oasis in the desert of East London.  It is surrounded on
every side by close-packed squalor and streets jammed by a young and
vile and dirty generation; but its own pavements are comparatively
bare of the children who have no other place to play, while it has
an air of desertion, so few are the people that come and go.

Each house in this street, as in all the streets, is shoulder to
shoulder with its neighbours.  To each house there is but one
entrance, the front door; and each house is about eighteen feet
wide, with a bit of a brick-walled yard behind, where, when it is
not raining, one may look at a slate-coloured sky.  But it must be
understood that this is East End opulence we are now considering.
Some of the people in this street are even so well-to-do as to keep
a "slavey."  Johnny Upright keeps one, as I well know, she being my
first acquaintance in this particular portion of the world.

To Johnny Upright's house I came, and to the door came the "slavey."
Now, mark you, her position in life was pitiable and contemptible,
but it was with pity and contempt that she looked at me.  She
evinced a plain desire that our conversation should be short.  It
was Sunday, and Johnny Upright was not at home, and that was all
there was to it.  But I lingered, discussing whether or not it was
all there was to it, till Mrs. Johnny Upright was attracted to the
door, where she scolded the girl for not having closed it before
turning her attention to me.

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

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

Would I kindly step in?--no, the lady did not ask me, though I
fished for an invitation by stating that I would go down to the
corner and wait in a public-house.  And down to the corner I went,
but, it being church time, the "pub" was closed.  A miserable
drizzle was falling, and, in lieu of better, I took a seat on a
neighbourly doorstep and waited.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shades of Old Sleuth and Sherlock Holmes!  I wondered as to where
the assistant was located whose duty it was to take down whatever
information I might loudly vouchsafe.  And to this day, much as I
have seen of Johnny Upright and much as I have puzzled over the
incident, I have never been quite able to make up my mind as to
whether or not he had a cold, or had an assistant planted in the
other room.  But of one thing I am sure:  though I gave Johnny
Upright the facts concerning myself and project, he withheld
judgment till next day, when I dodged into his street conventionally
garbed and in a hansom.  Then his greeting was cordial enough, and I
went down into the dining-room to join the family at tea.

"We are humble here," he said, "not given to the flesh, and you must
take us for what we are, in our humble way."

The girls were flushed and embarrassed at greeting me, while he did
not make it any the easier for them.

"Ha! ha!" he roared heartily, slapping the table with his open hand
till the dishes rang.  "The girls thought yesterday you had come to
ask for a piece of bread!  Ha! ha! ho! ho! ho!"

This they indignantly denied, with snapping eyes and guilty red
cheeks, as though it were an essential of true refinement to be able
to discern under his rags a man who had no need to go ragged.

And then, while I ate bread and marmalade, proceeded a play at cross
purposes, the daughters deeming it an insult to me that I should
have been mistaken for a beggar, and the father considering it as
the highest compliment to my cleverness to succeed in being so
mistaken.  All of which I enjoyed, and the bread, the marmalade, and
the tea, till the time came for Johnny Upright to find me a lodging,
which he did, not half-a-dozen doors away, in his own respectable
and opulent street, in a house as like to his own as a pea to its
mate.



CHAPTER III--MY LODGING AND SOME OTHERS



From an East London standpoint, the room I rented for six shillings,
or a dollar and a half, per week, was a most comfortable affair.
From the American standpoint, on the other hand, it was rudely
furnished, uncomfortable, and small.  By the time I had added an
ordinary typewriter table to its scanty furnishing, I was hard put
to turn around; at the best, I managed to navigate it by a sort of
vermicular progression requiring great dexterity and presence of
mind.

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

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

It being plain that as a poor young man with a family I could rent
no houses at all in this most undesirable region, I next looked for
rooms, unfurnished rooms, in which I could store my wife and babies
and chattels.  There were not many, but I found them, usually in the
singular, for one appears to be considered sufficient for a poor
man's family in which to cook and eat and sleep.  When I asked for
two rooms, the sublettees looked at me very much in the manner, I
imagine, that a certain personage looked at Oliver Twist when he
asked for more.

Not only was one room deemed sufficient for a poor man and his
family, but I learned that many families, occupying single rooms,
had so much space to spare as to be able to take in a lodger or two.
When such rooms can be rented for from three to six shillings per
week, it is a fair conclusion that a lodger with references should
obtain floor space for, say, from eightpence to a shilling.  He may
even be able to board with the sublettees for a few shillings more.
This, however, I failed to inquire into--a reprehensible error on my
part, considering that I was working on the basis of a hypothetical
family.

Not only did the houses I investigated have no bath-tubs, but I
learned that there were no bath-tubs in all the thousands of houses
I had seen.  Under the circumstances, with my wife and babies and a
couple of lodgers suffering from the too great spaciousness of one
room, taking a bath in a tin wash-basin would be an unfeasible
undertaking.  But, it seems, the compensation comes in with the
saving of soap, so all's well, and God's still in heaven.

However, I rented no rooms, but returned to my own Johnny Upright's
street.  What with my wife, and babies, and lodgers, and the various
cubby-holes into which I had fitted them, my mind's eye had become
narrow-angled, and I could not quite take in all of my own room at
once.  The immensity of it was awe-inspiring.  Could this be the
room I had rented for six shillings a week?  Impossible!  But my
landlady, knocking at the door to learn if I were comfortable,
dispelled my doubts.

"Oh yes, sir," she said, in reply to a question.  "This street is
the very last.  All the other streets were like this eight or ten
years ago, and all the people were very respectable.  But the others
have driven our kind out.  Those in this street are the only ones
left.  It's shocking, sir!"

And then she explained the process of saturation, by which the
rental value of a neighbourhood went up, while its tone went down.

"You see, sir, our kind are not used to crowding in the way the
others do.  We need more room.  The others, the foreigners and
lower-class people, can get five and six families into this house,
where we only get one.  So they can pay more rent for the house than
we can afford.  It IS shocking, sir; and just to think, only a few
years ago all this neighbourhood was just as nice as it could be."

I looked at her.  Here was a woman, of the finest grade of the
English working-class, with numerous evidences of refinement, being
slowly engulfed by that noisome and rotten tide of humanity which
the powers that be are pouring eastward out of London Town.  Bank,
factory, hotel, and office building must go up, and the city poor
folk are a nomadic breed; so they migrate eastward, wave upon wave,
saturating and degrading neighbourhood by neighbourhood, driving the
better class of workers before them to pioneer, on the rim of the
city, or dragging them down, if not in the first generation, surely
in the second and third.

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

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

And truly I saw Johnny Upright, and his good wife and fair
daughters, and frowzy slavey, like so many ghosts flitting eastward
through the gloom, the monster city roaring at their heels.

But Johnny Upright is not alone in his flitting.  Far, far out, on
the fringe of the city, live the small business men, little
managers, and successful clerks.  They dwell in cottages and semi-
detached villas, with bits of flower garden, and elbow room, and
breathing space.  They inflate themselves with pride, and throw out
their chests when they contemplate the Abyss from which they have
escaped, and they thank God that they are not as other men.  And lo!
down upon them comes Johnny Upright and the monster city at his
heels.  Tenements spring up like magic, gardens are built upon,
villas are divided and subdivided into many dwellings, and the black
night of London settles down in a greasy pall.



CHAPTER IV--A MAN AND THE ABYSS



"I say, can you let a lodging?"

These words I discharged carelessly over my shoulder at a stout and
elderly woman, of whose fare I was partaking in a greasy coffee-
house down near the Pool and not very far from Limehouse.

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

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

"Yus, sir," she at once volunteered; "I 'ave nice lodgin's you'd
likely tyke a fancy to.  Back from a voyage, sir?"

"How much for a room?" I inquired, ignoring her curiosity.

She looked me up and down with frank surprise.  "I don't let rooms,
not to my reg'lar lodgers, much less casuals."

"Then I'll have to look along a bit," I said, with marked
disappointment.

But the sight of my ten shillings had made her keen.  "I can let you
have a nice bed in with two hother men," she urged.  "Good,
respectable men, an' steady."

"But I don't want to sleep with two other men," I objected.

"You don't 'ave to.  There's three beds in the room, an' hit's not a
very small room."

"How much?" I demanded.

"'Arf a crown a week, two an' six, to a regular lodger.  You'll
fancy the men, I'm sure.  One works in the ware'ouse, an' 'e's been
with me two years now.  An' the hother's bin with me six--six years,
sir, an' two months comin' nex' Saturday.  'E's a scene-shifter,"
she went on.  "A steady, respectable man, never missin' a night's
work in the time 'e's bin with me.  An' 'e likes the 'ouse; 'e says
as it's the best 'e can do in the w'y of lodgin's.  I board 'im, an'
the hother lodgers too."

"I suppose he's saving money right along," I insinuated innocently.

"Bless you, no!  Nor can 'e do as well helsewhere with 'is money."

And I thought of my own spacious West, with room under its sky and
unlimited air for a thousand Londons; and here was this man, a
steady and reliable man, never missing a night's work, frugal and
honest, lodging in one room with two other men, paying two dollars
and a half per month for it, and out of his experience adjudging it
to be the best he could do!  And here was I, on the strength of the
ten shillings in my pocket, able to enter in with my rags and take
up my bed with him.  The human soul is a lonely thing, but it must
be very lonely sometimes when there are three beds to a room, and
casuals with ten shillings are admitted.

"How long have you been here?" I asked.

"Thirteen years, sir; an' don't you think you'll fancy the lodgin'?"

The while she talked she was shuffling ponderously about the small
kitchen in which she cooked the food for her lodgers who were also
boarders.  When I first entered, she had been hard at work, nor had
she let up once throughout the conversation.  Undoubtedly she was a
busy woman.  "Up at half-past five," "to bed the last thing at
night," "workin' fit ter drop," thirteen years of it, and for
reward, grey hairs, frowzy clothes, stooped shoulders, slatternly
figure, unending toil in a foul and noisome coffee-house that faced
on an alley ten feet between the walls, and a waterside environment
that was ugly and sickening, to say the least.

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

And as I turned and looked at her, I realized to the full the deeper
truth underlying that very wise old maxim:  "Virtue is its own
reward."

I went back to her.  "Have you ever taken a vacation?" I asked.

"Vycytion!"

"A trip to the country for a couple of days, fresh air, a day off,
you know, a rest."

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

Down near the West India Dock I came upon a young fellow staring
disconsolately at the muddy water.  A fireman's cap was pulled down
across his eyes, and the fit and sag of his clothes whispered
unmistakably of the sea.

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

"Worked yer way over on a cattle boat?" he countered, fixing my
nationality on the instant.

And thereupon we entered upon a talk that extended itself to a
public-house and a couple of pints of "arf an' arf."  This led to
closer intimacy, so that when I brought to light all of a shilling's
worth of coppers (ostensibly my all), and put aside sixpence for a
bed, and sixpence for more arf an' arf, he generously proposed that
we drink up the whole shilling.

"My mate, 'e cut up rough las' night," he explained.  "An' the
bobbies got 'm, so you can bunk in wi' me.  Wotcher say?"

I said yes, and by the time we had soaked ourselves in a whole
shilling's worth of beer, and slept the night on a miserable bed in
a miserable den, I knew him pretty fairly for what he was.  And that
in one respect he was representative of a large body of the lower-
class London workman, my later experience substantiates.

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

He had had a mother and numerous squalling brothers and sisters, all
crammed into a couple of rooms and living on poorer and less regular
food than he could ordinarily rustle for himself.  In fact, he never
went home except at periods when he was unfortunate in procuring his
own food.  Petty pilfering and begging along the streets and docks,
a trip or two to sea as mess-boy, a few trips more as coal-trimmer,
and then a full-fledged fireman, he had reached the top of his life.

And in the course of this he had also hammered out a philosophy of
life, an ugly and repulsive philosophy, but withal a very logical
and sensible one from his point of view.  When I asked him what he
lived for, he immediately answered, "Booze."  A voyage to sea (for a
man must live and get the wherewithal), and then the paying off and
the big drunk at the end.  After that, haphazard little drunks,
sponged in the "pubs" from mates with a few coppers left, like
myself, and when sponging was played out another trip to sea and a
repetition of the beastly cycle.

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

"Wimmen!"  He thumped his pot upon the bar and orated eloquently.
"Wimmen is a thing my edication 'as learnt me t' let alone.  It
don't pay, matey; it don't pay.  Wot's a man like me want o' wimmen,
eh? jest you tell me.  There was my mar, she was enough, a-bangin'
the kids about an' makin' the ole man mis'rable when 'e come 'ome,
w'ich was seldom, I grant.  An' fer w'y?  Becos o' mar!  She didn't
make 'is 'ome 'appy, that was w'y.  Then, there's the other wimmen,
'ow do they treat a pore stoker with a few shillin's in 'is
trouseys?  A good drunk is wot 'e's got in 'is pockits, a good long
drunk, an' the wimmen skin 'im out of his money so quick 'e ain't
'ad 'ardly a glass.  I know.  I've 'ad my fling, an' I know wot's
wot.  An' I tell you, where's wimmen is trouble--screechin' an'
carryin' on, fightin', cuttin', bobbies, magistrates, an' a month's
'ard labour back of it all, an' no pay-day when you come out."

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

"Garn!" he cried, with a playful shove of his fist on my shoulder.
"Wot's yer game, eh?  A missus kissin' an' kids clim'in', an' kettle
singin', all on four poun' ten a month w'en you 'ave a ship, an'
four nothin' w'en you 'aven't.  I'll tell you wot I'd get on four
poun' ten--a missus rowin', kids squallin', no coal t' make the
kettle sing, an' the kettle up the spout, that's wot I'd get.
Enough t' make a bloke bloomin' well glad to be back t' sea.  A
missus!  Wot for?  T' make you mis'rable?  Kids?  Jest take my
counsel, matey, an' don't 'ave 'em.  Look at me!  I can 'ave my beer
w'en I like, an' no blessed missus an' kids a-crying for bread.  I'm
'appy, I am, with my beer an' mates like you, an' a good ship
comin', an' another trip to sea.  So I say, let's 'ave another pint.
Arf an' arf's good enough for me."

Without going further with the speech of this young fellow of two-
and-twenty, I think I have sufficiently indicated his philosophy of
life and the underlying economic reason for it.  Home life he had
never known.  The word "home" aroused nothing but unpleasant
associations.  In the low wages of his father, and of other men in
the same walk in life, he found sufficient reason for branding wife
and children as encumbrances and causes of masculine misery.  An
unconscious hedonist, utterly unmoral and materialistic, he sought
the greatest possible happiness for himself, and found it in drink.

A young sot; a premature wreck; physical inability to do a stoker's
work; the gutter or the workhouse; and the end--he saw it all as
clearly as I, but it held no terrors for him.  From the moment of
his birth, all the forces of his environment had tended to harden
him, and he viewed his wretched, inevitable future with a
callousness and unconcern I could not shake.

And yet he was not a bad man.  He was not inherently vicious and
brutal.  He had normal mentality, and a more than average physique.
His eyes were blue and round, shaded by long lashes, and wide apart.
And there was a laugh in them, and a fund of humour behind.  The
brow and general features were good, the mouth and lips sweet,
though already developing a harsh twist.  The chin was weak, but not
too weak; I have seen men sitting in the high places with weaker.

His head was shapely, and so gracefully was it poised upon a perfect
neck that I was not surprised by his body that night when he
stripped for bed.  I have seen many men strip, in gymnasium and
training quarters, men of good blood and upbringing, but I have
never seen one who stripped to better advantage than this young sot
of two-and-twenty, this young god doomed to rack and ruin in four or
five short years, and to pass hence without posterity to receive the
splendid heritage it was his to bequeath.

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

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

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

Mr. A. C. Pigou has said that the aged poor, and the residuum which
compose the "submerged tenth," constitute 71 per cent, of the
population of London.  Which is to say that last year, and
yesterday, and to-day, at this very moment, 450,000 of these
creatures are dying miserably at the bottom of the social pit called
"London."  As to how they die, I shall take an instance from this
morning's paper.


SELF-NEGLECT

Yesterday Dr. Wynn Westcott held an inquest at Shoreditch,
respecting the death of Elizabeth Crews, aged 77 years, of 32 East
Street, Holborn, who died on Wednesday last.  Alice Mathieson stated
that she was landlady of the house where deceased lived.  Witness
last saw her alive on the previous Monday.  She lived quite alone.
Mr. Francis Birch, relieving officer for the Holborn district,
stated that deceased had occupied the room in question for thirty-
five years.  When witness was called, on the 1st, he found the old
woman in a terrible state, and the ambulance and coachman had to be
disinfected after the removal.  Dr. Chase Fennell said death was due
to blood-poisoning from bed-sores, due to self-neglect and filthy
surroundings, and the jury returned a verdict to that effect.


The most startling thing about this little incident of a woman's
death is the smug complacency with which the officials looked upon
it and rendered judgment.  That an old woman of seventy-seven years
of age should die of SELF-NEGLECT is the most optimistic way
possible of looking at it.  It was the old dead woman's fault that
she died, and having located the responsibility, society goes
contentedly on about its own affairs.

Of the "submerged tenth" Mr. Pigou has said:  "Either through lack
of bodily strength, or of intelligence, or of fibre, or of all
three, they are inefficient or unwilling workers, and consequently
unable to support themselves . . . They are often so degraded in
intellect as to be incapable of distinguishing their right from
their left hand, or of recognising the numbers of their own houses;
their bodies are feeble and without stamina, their affections are
warped, and they scarcely know what family life means."

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



CHAPTER V--THOSE ON THE EDGE



My first impression of East London was naturally a general one.
Later the details began to appear, and here and there in the chaos
of misery I found little spots where a fair measure of happiness
reigned--sometimes whole rows of houses in little out-of-the-way
streets, where artisans dwell and where a rude sort of family life
obtains.  In the evenings the men can be seen at the doors, pipes in
their mouths and children on their knees, wives gossiping, and
laughter and fun going on.  The content of these people is
manifestly great, for, relative to the wretchedness that encompasses
them, they are well off.

But at the best, it is a dull, animal happiness, the content of the
full belly.  The dominant note of their lives is materialistic.
They are stupid and heavy, without imagination.  The Abyss seems to
exude a stupefying atmosphere of torpor, which wraps about them and
deadens them.  Religion passes them by.  The Unseen holds for them
neither terror nor delight.  They are unaware of the Unseen; and the
full belly and the evening pipe, with their regular "arf an' arf,"
is all they demand, or dream of demanding, from existence.

This would not be so bad if it were all; but it is not all.  The
satisfied torpor in which they are sunk is the deadly inertia that
precedes dissolution.  There is no progress, and with them not to
progress is to fall back and into the Abyss.  In their own lives
they may only start to fall, leaving the fall to be completed by
their children and their children's children.  Man always gets less
than he demands from life; and so little do they demand, that the
less than little they get cannot save them.

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

If nothing else, the air he breathes, and from which he never
escapes, is sufficient to weaken him mentally and physically, so
that he becomes unable to compete with the fresh virile life from
the country hastening on to London Town to destroy and be destroyed.

Leaving out the disease germs that fill the air of the East End,
consider but the one item of smoke.  Sir William Thiselton-Dyer,
curator of Kew Gardens, has been studying smoke deposits on
vegetation, and, according to his calculations, no less than six
tons of solid matter, consisting of soot and tarry hydrocarbons, are
deposited every week on every quarter of a square mile in and about
London.  This is equivalent to twenty-four tons per week to the
square mile, or 1248 tons per year to the square mile.  From the
cornice below the dome of St. Paul's Cathedral was recently taken a
solid deposit of crystallised sulphate of lime.  This deposit had
been formed by the action of the sulphuric acid in the atmosphere
upon the carbonate of lime in the stone.  And this sulphuric acid in
the atmosphere is constantly being breathed by the London workmen
through all the days and nights of their lives.

It is incontrovertible that the children grow up into rotten adults,
without virility or stamina, a weak-kneed, narrow-chested, listless
breed, that crumples up and goes down in the brute struggle for life
with the invading hordes from the country.  The railway men,
carriers, omnibus drivers, corn and timber porters, and all those
who require physical stamina, are largely drawn from the country;
while in the Metropolitan Police there are, roughly, 12,000 country-
born as against 3000 London-born.

So one is forced to conclude that the Abyss is literally a huge man-
killing machine, and when I pass along the little out-of-the-way
streets with the full-bellied artisans at the doors, I am aware of a
greater sorrow for them than for the 450,000 lost and hopeless
wretches dying at the bottom of the pit.  They, at least, are dying,
that is the point; while these have yet to go through the slow and
preliminary pangs extending through two and even three generations.

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

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

The pair had two daughters, and the four of them lived in a couple
of holes, called "rooms" by courtesy, for which they paid seven
shillings per week.  They possessed no stove, managing their cooking
on a single gas-ring in the fireplace.  Not being persons of
property, they were unable to obtain an unlimited supply of gas; but
a clever machine had been installed for their benefit.  By dropping
a penny in the slot, the gas was forthcoming, and when a penny's
worth had forthcome the supply was automatically shut off.  "A penny
gawn in no time," she explained, "an' the cookin' not arf done!"

Incipient starvation had been their portion for years.  Month in and
month out, they had arisen from the table able and willing to eat
more.  And when once on the downward slope, chronic innutrition is
an important factor in sapping vitality and hastening the descent.

Yet this woman was a hard worker.  From 4.30 in the morning till the
last light at night, she said, she had toiled at making cloth dress-
skirts, lined up and with two flounces, for seven shillings a dozen.
Cloth dress-skirts, mark you, lined up with two flounces, for seven
shillings a dozen!  This is equal to $1.75 per dozen, or 14.75 cents
per skirt.

The husband, in order to obtain employment, had to belong to the
union, which collected one shilling and sixpence from him each week.
Also, when strikes were afoot and he chanced to be working, he had
at times been compelled to pay as high as seventeen shillings into
the union's coffers for the relief fund.

One daughter, the elder, had worked as green hand for a dressmaker,
for one shilling and sixpence per week--37.5 cents per week, or a
fraction over 5 cents per day.  However, when the slack season came
she was discharged, though she had been taken on at such low pay
with the understanding that she was to learn the trade and work up.
After that she had been employed in a bicycle store for three years,
for which she received five shillings per week, walking two miles to
her work, and two back, and being fined for tardiness.

As far as the man and woman were concerned, the game was played.
They had lost handhold and foothold, and were falling into the pit.
But what of the daughters?  Living like swine, enfeebled by chronic
innutrition, being sapped mentally, morally, and physically, what
chance have they to crawl up and out of the Abyss into which they
were born falling?

As I write this, and for an hour past, the air has been made hideous
by a free-for-all, rough-and-tumble fight going on in the yard that
is back to back with my yard.  When the first sounds reached me I
took it for the barking and snarling of dogs, and some minutes were
required to convince me that human beings, and women at that, could
produce such a fearful clamour.

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

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

The back windows of the houses commanding the scene are lined with
enthusiastic spectators, and the sound of blows, and of oaths that
make one's blood run cold, are borne to my ears.  Happily, I cannot
see the combatants.

A lull; "You let that child alone!" child, evidently of few years,
screaming in downright terror.  "Awright," repeated insistently and
at top pitch twenty times straight running; "you'll git this rock on
the 'ead!" and then rock evidently on the head from the shriek that
goes up.

A lull; apparently one combatant temporarily disabled and being
resuscitated; child's voice audible again, but now sunk to a lower
note of terror and growing exhaustion.

Voices begin to go up the scale, something like this:-

"Yes?"

"Yes!"

"Yes?"

"Yes!"

"Yes?"

"Yes!"

"Yes?"

"Yes!"

Sufficient affirmation on both sides, conflict again precipitated.
One combatant gets overwhelming advantage, and follows it up from
the way the other combatant screams bloody murder.  Bloody murder
gurgles and dies out, undoubtedly throttled by a strangle hold.

Entrance of new voices; a flank attack; strangle hold suddenly
broken from the way bloody murder goes up half an octave higher than
before; general hullaballoo, everybody fighting.

Lull; new voice, young girl's, "I'm goin' ter tyke my mother's
part;" dialogue, repeated about five times, "I'll do as I like,
blankety, blank, blank!"  "I'd like ter see yer, blankety, blank,
blank!" renewed conflict, mothers, daughters, everybody, during
which my landlady calls her young daughter in from the back steps,
while I wonder what will be the effect of all that she has heard
upon her moral fibre.



CHAPTER VI--FRYING-PAN ALLEY AND A GLIMPSE OF INFERNO



Three of us walked down Mile End Road, and one was a hero.  He was a
slender lad of nineteen, so slight and frail, in fact, that, like
Fra Lippo Lippi, a puff of wind might double him up and turn him
over.  He was a burning young socialist, in the first throes of
enthusiasm and ripe for martyrdom.  As platform speaker or chairman
he had taken an active and dangerous part in the many indoor and
outdoor pro-Boer meetings which have vexed the serenity of Merry
England these several years back.  Little items he had been
imparting to me as he walked along; of being mobbed in parks and on
tram-cars; of climbing on the platform to lead the forlorn hope,
when brother speaker after brother speaker had been dragged down by
the angry crowd and cruelly beaten; of a siege in a church, where he
and three others had taken sanctuary, and where, amid flying
missiles and the crashing of stained glass, they had fought off the
mob till rescued by platoons of constables; of pitched and giddy
battles on stairways, galleries, and balconies; of smashed windows,
collapsed stairways, wrecked lecture halls, and broken heads and
bones--and then, with a regretful sigh, he looked at me and said:
"How I envy you big, strong men!  I'm such a little mite I can't do
much when it comes to fighting."

And I, walking head and shoulders above my two companions,
remembered my own husky West, and the stalwart men it had been my
custom, in turn, to envy there.  Also, as I looked at the mite of a
youth with the heart of a lion, I thought, this is the type that on
occasion rears barricades and shows the world that men have not
forgotten how to die.

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

"I'm a 'earty man, I am,' he announced.  "Not like the other chaps
at my shop, I ain't.  They consider me a fine specimen of manhood.
W'y, d' ye know, I weigh ten stone!"

I was ashamed to tell him that I weighed one hundred and seventy
pounds, or over twelve stone, so I contented myself with taking his
measure.  Poor, misshapen little man!  His skin an unhealthy colour,
body gnarled and twisted out of all decency, contracted chest,
shoulders bent prodigiously from long hours of toil, and head
hanging heavily forward and out of place!  A "'earty man,' 'e was!"

"How tall are you?"

"Five foot two," he answered proudly; "an' the chaps at the shop . .
. "

"Let me see that shop," I said.

The shop was idle just then, but I still desired to see it.  Passing
Leman Street, we cut off to the left into Spitalfields, and dived
into Frying-pan Alley.  A spawn of children cluttered the slimy
pavement, for all the world like tadpoles just turned frogs on the
bottom of a dry pond.  In a narrow doorway, so narrow that perforce
we stepped over her, sat a woman with a young babe, nursing at
breasts grossly naked and libelling all the sacredness of
motherhood.  In the black and narrow hall behind her we waded
through a mess of young life, and essayed an even narrower and
fouler stairway.  Up we went, three flights, each landing two feet
by three in area, and heaped with filth and refuse.

There were seven rooms in this abomination called a house.  In six
of the rooms, twenty-odd people, of both sexes and all ages, cooked,
ate, slept, and worked.  In size the rooms averaged eight feet by
eight, or possibly nine.  The seventh room we entered.  It was the
den in which five men "sweated."  It was seven feet wide by eight
long, and the table at which the work was performed took up the
major portion of the space.  On this table were five lasts, and
there was barely room for the men to stand to their work, for the
rest of the space was heaped with cardboard, leather, bundles of
shoe uppers, and a miscellaneous assortment of materials used in
attaching the uppers of shoes to their soles.

In the adjoining room lived a woman and six children.  In another
vile hole lived a widow, with an only son of sixteen who was dying
of consumption.  The woman hawked sweetmeats on the street, I was
told, and more often failed than not to supply her son with the
three quarts of milk he daily required.  Further, this son, weak and
dying, did not taste meat oftener than once a week; and the kind and
quality of this meat cannot possibly be imagined by people who have
never watched human swine eat.

"The w'y 'e coughs is somethin' terrible," volunteered my sweated
friend, referring to the dying boy.  "We 'ear 'im 'ere, w'ile we're
workin', an' it's terrible, I say, terrible!"

And, what of the coughing and the sweetmeats, I found another menace
added to the hostile environment of the children of the slum.

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

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

"But it's only the best of us can do it," he qualified.  "An' then
we work twelve, thirteen, and fourteen hours a day, just as fast as
we can.  An' you should see us sweat!  Just running from us!  If you
could see us, it'd dazzle your eyes--tacks flyin' out of mouth like
from a machine.  Look at my mouth."

I looked.  The teeth were worn down by the constant friction of the
metallic brads, while they were coal-black and rotten.

"I clean my teeth," he added, "else they'd be worse."

After he had told me that the workers had to furnish their own
tools, brads, "grindery," cardboard, rent, light, and what not, it
was plain that his thirty bob was a diminishing quantity.

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

"Four months," was the answer; and for the rest of the year, he
informed me, they average from "half a quid" to a "quid" a week,
which is equivalent to from two dollars and a half to five dollars.
The present week was half gone, and he had earned four bob, or one
dollar.  And yet I was given to understand that this was one of the
better grades of sweating.

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

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

We next visited the municipal dwellings erected by the London County
Council on the site of the slums where lived Arthur Morrison's
"Child of the Jago."  While the buildings housed more people than
before, it was much healthier.  But the dwellings were inhabited by
the better-class workmen and artisans.  The slum people had simply
drifted on to crowd other slums or to form new slums.

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

The shadow of Christ's Church falls across Spitalfields Garden, and
in the shadow of Christ's Church, at three o'clock in the afternoon,
I saw a sight I never wish to see again.  There are no flowers in
this garden, which is smaller than my own rose garden at home.
Grass only grows here, and it is surrounded by a sharp-spiked iron
fencing, as are all the parks of London Town, so that homeless men
and women may not come in at night and sleep upon it.

As we entered the garden, an old woman, between fifty and sixty,
passed us, striding with sturdy intention if somewhat rickety
action, with two bulky bundles, covered with sacking, slung fore and
aft upon her.  She was a woman tramp, a houseless soul, too
independent to drag her failing carcass through the workhouse door.
Like the snail, she carried her home with her.  In the two sacking-
covered bundles were her household goods, her wardrobe, linen, and
dear feminine possessions.

We went up the narrow gravelled walk.  On the benches on either side
arrayed a mass of miserable and distorted humanity, the sight of
which would have impelled Dore to more diabolical flights of fancy
than he ever succeeded in achieving.  It was a welter of rags and
filth, of all manner of loathsome skin diseases, open sores,
bruises, grossness, indecency, leering monstrosities, and bestial
faces.  A chill, raw wind was blowing, and these creatures huddled
there in their rags, sleeping for the most part, or trying to sleep.
Here were a dozen women, ranging in age from twenty years to
seventy.  Next a babe, possibly of nine months, lying asleep, flat
on the hard bench, with neither pillow nor covering, nor with any
one looking after it.  Next half-a-dozen men, sleeping bolt upright
or leaning against one another in their sleep.  In one place a
family group, a child asleep in its sleeping mother's arms, and the
husband (or male mate) clumsily mending a dilapidated shoe.  On
another bench a woman trimming the frayed strips of her rags with a
knife, and another woman, with thread and needle, sewing up rents.
Adjoining, a man holding a sleeping woman in his arms.  Farther on,
a man, his clothing caked with gutter mud, asleep, with head in the
lap of a woman, not more than twenty-five years old, and also
asleep.

It was this sleeping that puzzled me.  Why were nine out of ten of
them asleep or trying to sleep?  But it was not till afterwards that
I learned.  IT IS A LAW OF THE POWERS THAT BE THAT THE HOMELESS
SHALL NOT SLEEP BY NIGHT.  On the pavement, by the portico of
Christ's Church, where the stone pillars rise toward the sky in a
stately row, were whole rows of men lying asleep or drowsing, and
all too deep sunk in torpor to rouse or be made curious by our
intrusion.

"A lung of London," I said; "nay, an abscess, a great putrescent
sore."

"Oh, why did you bring me here?" demanded the burning young
socialist, his delicate face white with sickness of soul and stomach
sickness.

"Those women there," said our guide, "will sell themselves for
thru'pence, or tu'pence, or a loaf of stale bread."

He said it with a cheerful sneer.

But what more he might have said I do not know, for the sick man
cried, "For heaven's sake let us get out of this."



CHAPTER VII--A WINNER OF THE VICTORIA CROSS



I have found that it is not easy to get into the casual ward of the
workhouse.  I have made two attempts now, and I shall shortly make a
third.  The first time I started out at seven o'clock in the evening
with four shillings in my pocket.  Herein I committed two errors.
In the first place, the applicant for admission to the casual ward
must be destitute, and as he is subjected to a rigorous search, he
must really be destitute; and fourpence, much less four shillings,
is sufficient affluence to disqualify him.  In the second place, I
made the mistake of tardiness.  Seven o'clock in the evening is too
late in the day for a pauper to get a pauper's bed.

For the benefit of gently nurtured and innocent folk, let me explain
what a ward is.  It is a building where the homeless, bedless,
penniless man, if he be lucky, may CASUALLY rest his weary bones,
and then work like a navvy next day to pay for it.

My second attempt to break into the casual ward began more
auspiciously.  I started in the middle of the afternoon, accompanied
by the burning young socialist and another friend, and all I had in
my pocket was thru'pence.  They piloted me to the Whitechapel
Workhouse, at which I peered from around a friendly corner.  It was
a few minutes past five in the afternoon but already a long and
melancholy line was formed, which strung out around the corner of
the building and out of sight.

It was a most woeful picture, men and women waiting in the cold grey
end of the day for a pauper's shelter from the night, and I confess
it almost unnerved me.  Like the boy before the dentist's door, I
suddenly discovered a multitude of reasons for being elsewhere.
Some hints of the struggle going on within must have shown in my
face, for one of my companions said, "Don't funk; you can do it."

Of course I could do it, but I became aware that even thru'pence in
my pocket was too lordly a treasure for such a throng; and, in order
that all invidious distinctions might be removed, I emptied out the
coppers.  Then I bade good-bye to my friends, and with my heart
going pit-a-pat, slouched down the street and took my place at the
end of the line.  Woeful it looked, this line of poor folk tottering
on the steep pitch to death; how woeful it was I did not dream.

Next to me stood a short, stout man.  Hale and hearty, though aged,
strong-featured, with the tough and leathery skin produced by long
years of sunbeat and weatherbeat, his was the unmistakable sea face
and eyes; and at once there came to me a bit of Kipling's "Galley
Slave":-


"By the brand upon my shoulder, by the gall of clinging steel;
By the welt the whips have left me, by the scars that never heal;
By eyes grown old with staring through the sun-wash on the brine,
I am paid in full for service . . . "


How correct I was in my surmise, and how peculiarly appropriate the
verse was, you shall learn.

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

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

He whirled with fierce passion on me:  "Don't you ever let yourself
grow old, lad.  Die when you're young, or you'll come to this.  I'm
tellin' you sure.  Seven an' eighty years am I, an' served my
country like a man.  Three good-conduct stripes and the Victoria
Cross, an' this is what I get for it.  I wish I was dead, I wish I
was dead.  Can't come any too quick for me, I tell you."

The moisture rushed into his eyes, but, before the other man could
comfort him, he began to hum a lilting sea song as though there was
no such thing as heartbreak in the world.

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

As a boy he had enlisted in the British navy, and for two score
years and more served faithfully and well.  Names, dates,
commanders, ports, ships, engagements, and battles, rolled from his
lips in a steady stream, but it is beyond me to remember them all,
for it is not quite in keeping to take notes at the poorhouse door.
He had been through the "First War in China," as he termed it; had
enlisted with the East India Company and served ten years in India;
was back in India again, in the English navy, at the time of the
Mutiny; had served in the Burmese War and in the Crimea; and all
this in addition to having fought and toiled for the English flag
pretty well over the rest of the globe.

Then the thing happened.  A little thing, it could only be traced
back to first causes:  perhaps the lieutenant's breakfast had not
agreed with him; or he had been up late the night before; or his
debts were pressing; or the commander had spoken brusquely to him.
The point is, that on this particular day the lieutenant was
irritable.  The sailor, with others, was "setting up" the fore
rigging.

Now, mark you, the sailor had been over forty years in the navy, had
three good-conduct stripes, and possessed the Victoria Cross for
distinguished service in battle; so he could not have been such an
altogether bad sort of a sailorman.  The lieutenant was irritable;
the lieutenant called him a name--well, not a nice sort of name.  It
referred to his mother.  When I was a boy it was our boys' code to
fight like little demons should such an insult be given our mothers;
and many men have died in my part of the world for calling other men
this name.

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

And then, in the man's own words:  "I saw what I had done.  I knew
the Regulations, and I said to myself, 'It's all up with you, Jack,
my boy; so here goes.'  An' I jumped over after him, my mind made up
to drown us both.  An' I'd ha' done it, too, only the pinnace from
the flagship was just comin' alongside.  Up we came to the top, me a
hold of him an' punchin' him.  This was what settled for me.  If I
hadn't ben strikin' him, I could have claimed that, seein' what I
had done, I jumped over to save him."

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

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

At last the door came in sight, through which the paupers were being
admitted in bunches.  And here I learned a surprising thing:  THIS
BEING WEDNESDAY, NONE OF US WOULD BE RELEASED TILL FRIDAY MORNING.
Furthermore, and oh, you tobacco users, take heed:  WE WOULD NOT BE
PERMITTED TO TAKE IN ANY TOBACCO.  This we would have to surrender
as we entered.  Sometimes, I was told, it was returned on leaving
and sometimes it was destroyed.

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

Again and again the line moved up, and we were slowly but surely
approaching the wicket.  At the moment we happened to be standing on
an iron grating, and a man appearing underneath, the old sailor
called down to him, -

"How many more do they want?"

"Twenty-four," came the answer.

We looked ahead anxiously and counted.  Thirty-four were ahead of
us.  Disappointment and consternation dawned upon the faces about
me.  It is not a nice thing, hungry and penniless, to face a
sleepless night in the streets.  But we hoped against hope, till,
when ten stood outside the wicket, the porter turned us away.

"Full up," was what he said, as he banged the door.

Like a flash, for all his eighty-seven years, the old sailor was
speeding away on the desperate chance of finding shelter elsewhere.
I stood and debated with two other men, wise in the knowledge of
casual wards, as to where we should go.  They decided on the Poplar
Workhouse, three miles away, and we started off.

As we rounded the corner, one of them said, "I could a' got in 'ere
to-day.  I come by at one o'clock, an' the line was beginnin' to
form then--pets, that's what they are.  They let 'm in, the same
ones, night upon night."



CHAPTER VIII--THE CARTER AND THE CARPENTER



The Carter, with his clean-cut face, chin beard, and shaved upper
lip, I should have taken in the United States for anything from a
master workman to a well-to-do farmer.  The Carpenter--well, I
should have taken him for a carpenter.  He looked it, lean and wiry,
with shrewd, observant eyes, and hands that had grown twisted to the
handles of tools through forty-seven years' work at the trade.  The
chief difficulty with these men was that they were old, and that
their children, instead of growing up to take care of them, had
died.  Their years had told on them, and they had been forced out of
the whirl of industry by the younger and stronger competitors who
had taken their places.

These two men, turned away from the casual ward of Whitechapel
Workhouse, were bound with me for Poplar Workhouse.  Not much of a
show, they thought, but to chance it was all that remained to us.
It was Poplar, or the streets and night.  Both men were anxious for
a bed, for they were "about gone," as they phrased it.  The Carter,
fifty-eight years of age, had spent the last three nights without
shelter or sleep, while the Carpenter, sixty-five years of age, had
been out five nights.

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

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

Not so with these homeless ones who walked to Poplar Workhouse with
me.  And there are thirty-five thousand of them, men and women, in
London Town this night.  Please don't remember it as you go to bed;
if you are as soft as you ought to be you may not rest so well as
usual.  But for old men of sixty, seventy, and eighty, ill-fed, with
neither meat nor blood, to greet the dawn unrefreshed, and to
stagger through the day in mad search for crusts, with relentless
night rushing down upon them again, and to do this five nights and
days--O dear, soft people, full of meat and blood, how can you ever
understand?

I walked up Mile End Road between the Carter and the Carpenter.
Mile End Road is a wide thoroughfare, cutting the heart of East
London, and there were tens of thousands of people abroad on it.  I
tell you this so that you may fully appreciate what I shall describe
in the next paragraph.  As I say, we walked along, and when they
grew bitter and cursed the land, I cursed with them, cursed as an
American waif would curse, stranded in a strange and terrible land.
And, as I tried to lead them to believe, and succeeded in making
them believe, they took me for a "seafaring man," who had spent his
money in riotous living, lost his clothes (no unusual occurrence
with seafaring men ashore), and was temporarily broke while looking
for a ship.  This accounted for my ignorance of English ways in
general and casual wards in particular, and my curiosity concerning
the same.

The Carter was hard put to keep the pace at which we walked (he told
me that he had eaten nothing that day), but the Carpenter, lean and
hungry, his grey and ragged overcoat flapping mournfully in the
breeze, swung on in a long and tireless stride which reminded me
strongly of the plains wolf or coyote.  Both kept their eyes upon
the pavement as they walked and talked, and every now and then one
or the other would stoop and pick something up, never missing the
stride the while.  I thought it was cigar and cigarette stumps they
were collecting, and for some time took no notice.  Then I did
notice.

FROM THE SLIMY, SPITTLE-DRENCHED, SIDEWALK, THEY WERE PICKING UP
BITS OF ORANGE PEEL, APPLE SKIN, AND GRAPE STEMS, AND, THEY WERE
EATING THEM.  THE PITS OF GREENGAGE PLUMS THEY CRACKED BETWEEN THEIR
TEETH FOR THE KERNELS INSIDE.  THEY PICKED UP STRAY BITS OF BREAD
THE SIZE OF PEAS, APPLE CORES SO BLACK AND DIRTY ONE WOULD NOT TAKE
THEM TO BE APPLE CORES, AND THESE THINGS THESE TWO MEN TOOK INTO
THEIR MOUTHS, AND CHEWED THEM, AND SWALLOWED THEM; AND THIS, BETWEEN
SIX AND SEVEN O'CLOCK IN THE EVENING OF AUGUST 20, YEAR OF OUR LORD
1902, IN THE HEART OF THE GREATEST, WEALTHIEST, AND MOST POWERFUL
EMPIRE THE WORLD HAS EVER SEEN.

These two men talked.  They were not fools, they were merely old.
And, naturally, their guts a-reek with pavement offal, they talked
of bloody revolution.  They talked as anarchists, fanatics, and
madmen would talk.  And who shall blame them?  In spite of my three
good meals that day, and the snug bed I could occupy if I wished,
and my social philosophy, and my evolutionary belief in the slow
development and metamorphosis of things--in spite of all this, I
say, I felt impelled to talk rot with them or hold my tongue.  Poor
fools!  Not of their sort are revolutions bred.  And when they are
dead and dust, which will be shortly, other fools will talk bloody
revolution as they gather offal from the spittle-drenched sidewalk
along Mile End Road to Poplar Workhouse.

Being a foreigner, and a young man, the Carter and the Carpenter
explained things to me and advised me.  Their advice, by the way,
was brief, and to the point; it was to get out of the country.  "As
fast as God'll let me," I assured them; "I'll hit only the high
places, till you won't be able to see my trail for smoke."  They
felt the force of my figures, rather than understood them, and they
nodded their heads approvingly.

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

"Used to be a toll-gate 'ere," said the Carter.  "Many's the time
I've paid my toll 'ere in my cartin' days."

"I've 'ad three 'a'penny rolls in two days," the Carpenter
announced, after a long pause in the conversation.  "Two of them I
ate yesterday, an' the third to-day," he concluded, after another
long pause.

"I ain't 'ad anything to-day," said the Carter.  "An' I'm fagged
out.  My legs is hurtin' me something fearful."

"The roll you get in the 'spike' is that 'ard you can't eat it
nicely with less'n a pint of water," said the Carpenter, for my
benefit.  And, on asking him what the "spike" was, he answered, "The
casual ward.  It's a cant word, you know."

But what surprised me was that he should have the word "cant" in his
vocabulary, a vocabulary that I found was no mean one before we
parted.

I asked them what I might expect in the way of treatment, if we
succeeded in getting into the Poplar Workhouse, and between them I
was supplied with much information.  Having taken a cold bath on
entering, I would be given for supper six ounces of bread and "three
parts of skilly."  "Three parts" means three-quarters of a pint, and
"skilly" is a fluid concoction of three quarts of oatmeal stirred
into three buckets and a half of hot water.

"Milk and sugar, I suppose, and a silver spoon?" I queried.

"No fear.  Salt's what you'll get, an' I've seen some places where
you'd not get any spoon.  'Old 'er up an' let 'er run down, that's
'ow they do it."

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

"Oh, wonderful skilly, that," praised the Carpenter, and each looked
eloquently at the other.

"Flour an' water at St. George's in the East," said the Carter.

The Carpenter nodded.  He had tried them all.

"Then what?" I demanded

And I was informed that I was sent directly to bed.  "Call you at
half after five in the mornin', an' you get up an' take a 'sluice'--
if there's any soap.  Then breakfast, same as supper, three parts o'
skilly an' a six-ounce loaf."

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

"'Tisn't, no; an' often that sour you can 'ardly eat it.  When first
I started I couldn't eat the skilly nor the bread, but now I can eat
my own an' another man's portion."

"I could eat three other men's portions," said the Carter.  "I
'aven't 'ad a bit this blessed day."

"Then what?"

"Then you've got to do your task, pick four pounds of oakum, or
clean an' scrub, or break ten to eleven hundredweight o' stones.  I
don't 'ave to break stones; I'm past sixty, you see.  They'll make
you do it, though.  You're young an' strong."

"What I don't like," grumbled the Carter, "is to be locked up in a
cell to pick oakum.  It's too much like prison."

"But suppose, after you've had your night's sleep, you refuse to
pick oakum, or break stones, or do any work at all?" I asked.

"No fear you'll refuse the second time; they'll run you in,"
answered the Carpenter.  "Wouldn't advise you to try it on, my lad."

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

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

Three working girls came along, and one looked pityingly at me; as
she passed I followed her with my eyes, and she still looked
pityingly back at me.  The old men she did not notice.  Dear Christ,
she pitied me, young and vigorous and strong, but she had no pity
for the two old men who stood by my side!  She was a young woman,
and I was a young man, and what vague sex promptings impelled her to
pity me put her sentiment on the lowest plane.  Pity for old men is
an altruistic feeling, and besides, the workhouse door is the
accustomed place for old men.  So she showed no pity for them, only
for me, who deserved it least or not at all.  Not in honour do grey
hairs go down to the grave in London Town.

On one side the door was a bell handle, on the other side a press
button.

"Ring the bell," said the Carter to me.

And just as I ordinarily would at anybody's door, I pulled out the
handle and rang a peal.

"Oh!  Oh!" they cried in one terrified voice.  "Not so 'ard!"

I let go, and they looked reproachfully at me, as though I had
imperilled their chance for a bed and three parts of skilly.  Nobody
came.  Luckily it was the wrong bell, and I felt better.

"Press the button," I said to the Carpenter.

"No, no, wait a bit," the Carter hurriedly interposed.

From all of which I drew the conclusion that a poorhouse porter, who
commonly draws a yearly salary of from seven to nine pounds, is a
very finicky and important personage, and cannot be treated too
fastidiously by--paupers.

So we waited, ten times a decent interval, when the Carter
stealthily advanced a timid forefinger to the button, and gave it
the faintest, shortest possible push.  I have looked at waiting men
where life or death was in the issue; but anxious suspense showed
less plainly on their faces than it showed on the faces of these two
men as they waited on the coming of the porter.

He came.  He barely looked at us.  "Full up," he said and shut the
door.

"Another night of it," groaned the Carpenter.  In the dim light the
Carter looked wan and grey.

Indiscriminate charity is vicious, say the professional
philanthropists.  Well, I resolved to be vicious.

"Come on; get your knife out and come here," I said to the Carter,
drawing him into a dark alley.

He glared at me in a frightened manner, and tried to draw back.
Possibly he took me for a latter-day Jack-the-Ripper, with a
penchant for elderly male paupers.  Or he may have thought I was
inveigling him into the commission of some desperate crime.  Anyway,
he was frightened.

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

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

Of course I had to explain to them that I was merely an
investigator, a social student, seeking to find out how the other
half lived.  And at once they shut up like clams.  I was not of
their kind; my speech had changed, the tones of my voice were
different, in short, I was a superior, and they were superbly class
conscious.

"What will you have?" I asked, as the waiter came for the order.

"Two slices an' a cup of tea," meekly said the Carter.

"Two slices an' a cup of tea," meekly said the Carpenter.

Stop a moment, and consider the situation.  Here were two men,
invited by me into the coffee-house.  They had seen my gold piece,
and they could understand that I was no pauper.  One had eaten a
ha'penny roll that day, the other had eaten nothing.  And they
called for "two slices an' a cup of tea!"  Each man had given a
tu'penny order.  "Two slices," by the way, means two slices of bread
and butter.

This was the same degraded humility that had characterised their
attitude toward the poorhouse porter.  But I wouldn't have it.  Step
by step I increased their order--eggs, rashers of bacon, more eggs,
more bacon, more tea, more slices and so forth--they denying
wistfully all the while that they cared for anything more, and
devouring it ravenously as fast as it arrived.

"First cup o' tea I've 'ad in a fortnight," said the Carter.

"Wonderful tea, that," said the Carpenter.

They each drank two pints of it, and I assure you that it was slops.
It resembled tea less than lager beer resembles champagne.  Nay, it
was "water-bewitched," and did not resemble tea at all.

It was curious, after the first shock, to notice the effect the food
had on them.  At first they were melancholy, and talked of the
divers times they had contemplated suicide.  The Carter, not a week
before, had stood on the bridge and looked at the water, and
pondered the question.  Water, the Carpenter insisted with heat, was
a bad route.  He, for one, he knew, would struggle.  A bullet was
"'andier," but how under the sun was he to get hold of a revolver?
That was the rub.

They grew more cheerful as the hot "tea" soaked in, and talked more
about themselves.  The Carter had buried his wife and children, with
the exception of one son, who grew to manhood and helped him in his
little business.  Then the thing happened.  The son, a man of
thirty-one, died of the smallpox.  No sooner was this over than the
father came down with fever and went to the hospital for three
months.  Then he was done for.  He came out weak, debilitated, no
strong young son to stand by him, his little business gone
glimmering, and not a farthing.  The thing had happened, and the
game was up.  No chance for an old man to start again.  Friends all
poor and unable to help.  He had tried for work when they were
putting up the stands for the first Coronation parade.  "An' I got
fair sick of the answer:  'No! no! no!'  It rang in my ears at night
when I tried to sleep, always the same, 'No! no! no!'"  Only the
past week he had answered an advertisement in Hackney, and on giving
his age was told, "Oh, too old, too old by far."

The Carpenter had been born in the army, where his father had served
twenty-two years.  Likewise, his two brothers had gone into the
army; one, troop sergeant-major of the Seventh Hussars, dying in
India after the Mutiny; the other, after nine years under Roberts in
the East, had been lost in Egypt.  The Carpenter had not gone into
the army, so here he was, still on the planet.

"But 'ere, give me your 'and," he said, ripping open his ragged
shirt.  "I'm fit for the anatomist, that's all.  I'm wastin' away,
sir, actually wastin' away for want of food.  Feel my ribs an'
you'll see."

I put my hand under his shirt and felt.  The skin was stretched like
parchment over the bones, and the sensation produced was for all the
world like running one's hand over a washboard.

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

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

"Nor I," agreed the Carpenter, and they fell to discussing belly
delights and the fine dishes their respective wives had cooked in
the old days.

"I've gone three days and never broke my fast," said the Carter.

"And I, five," his companion added, turning gloomy with the memory
of it.  "Five days once, with nothing on my stomach but a bit of
orange peel, an' outraged nature wouldn't stand it, sir, an' I near
died.  Sometimes, walkin' the streets at night, I've ben that
desperate I've made up my mind to win the horse or lose the saddle.
You know what I mean, sir--to commit some big robbery.  But when
mornin' come, there was I, too weak from 'unger an' cold to 'arm a
mouse."

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

One last incident, as I bade them good-bye on the corner, happy with
a couple of shillings in their pockets and the certain prospect of a
bed for the night.  Lighting a cigarette, I was about to throw away
the burning match when the Carter reached for it.  I proffered him
the box, but he said, "Never mind, won't waste it, sir."  And while
he lighted the cigarette I had given him, the Carpenter hurried with
the filling of his pipe in order to have a go at the same match.

"It's wrong to waste," said he.

"Yes," I said, but I was thinking of the wash-board ribs over which
I had run my hand.



CHAPTER IX--THE SPIKE



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

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

Conversation was slack at first, standing there, till the man on one
side of me and the man on the other side of me discovered that they
had been in the smallpox hospital at the same time, though a full
house of sixteen hundred patients had prevented their becoming
acquainted.  But they made up for it, discussing and comparing the
more loathsome features of their disease in the most cold-blooded,
matter-of-fact way.  I learned that the average mortality was one in
six, that one of them had been in three months and the other three
months and a half, and that they had been "rotten wi' it."  Whereat
my flesh began to creep and crawl, and I asked them how long they
had been out.  One had been out two weeks, and the other three
weeks.  Their faces were badly pitted (though each assured the other
that this was not so), and further, they showed me in their hands
and under the nails the smallpox "seeds" still working out.  Nay,
one of them worked a seed out for my edification, and pop it went,
right out of his flesh into the air.  I tried to shrink up smaller
inside my clothes, and I registered a fervent though silent hope
that it had not popped on me.

In both instances, I found that the smallpox was the cause of their
being "on the doss," which means on the tramp.  Both had been
working when smitten by the disease, and both had emerged from the
hospital "broke," with the gloomy task before them of hunting for
work.  So far, they had not found any, and they had come to the
spike for a "rest up" after three days and nights on the street.

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

At the first hospital, whither he was immediately carried, they said
it was a rupture, reduced the swelling, gave him some vaseline to
rub on it, kept him four hours, and told him to get along.  But he
was not on the streets more than two or three hours when he was down
on his back again.  This time he went to another hospital and was
patched up.  But the point is, the employer did nothing, positively
nothing, for the man injured in his employment, and even refused him
"a light job now and again," when he came out.  As far as Ginger is
concerned, he is a broken man.  His only chance to earn a living was
by heavy work.  He is now incapable of performing heavy work, and
from now until he dies, the spike, the peg, and the streets are all
he can look forward to in the way of food and shelter.  The thing
happened--that is all.  He put his back under too great a load of
fish, and his chance for happiness in life was crossed off the
books.

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

I was on the seafaring-man-who-had-lost-his-clothes-and-money tack,
and they all condoled with me and gave me much sound advice.  To sum
it up, the advice was something like this:  To keep out of all
places like the spike.  There was nothing good in it for me.  To
head for the coast and bend every effort to get away on a ship.  To
go to work, if possible, and scrape together a pound or so, with
which I might bribe some steward or underling to give me chance to
work my passage.  They envied me my youth and strength, which would
sooner or later get me out of the country.  These they no longer
possessed.  Age and English hardship had broken them, and for them
the game was played and up.

There was one, however, who was still young, and who, I am sure,
will in the end make it out.  He had gone to the United States as a
young fellow, and in fourteen years' residence the longest period he
had been out of work was twelve hours.  He had saved his money,
grown too prosperous, and returned to the mother-country.  Now he
was standing in line at the spike.

For the past two years, he told me, he had been working as a cook.
His hours had been from 7 a.m to 10.30 p.m., and on Saturday to
12.30 p.m.--ninety-five hours per week, for which he had received
twenty shillings, or five dollars.

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

This was his first night in the spike, and he had come in only to
get rested.  As soon as he emerged, he intended to start for
Bristol, a one-hundred-and-ten-mile walk, where he thought he would
eventually get a ship for the States.

But the men in the line were not all of this calibre.  Some were
poor, wretched beasts, inarticulate and callous, but for all of
that, in many ways very human.  I remember a carter, evidently
returning home after the day's work, stopping his cart before us so
that his young hopeful, who had run to meet him, could climb in.
But the cart was big, the young hopeful little, and he failed in his
several attempts to swarm up.  Whereupon one of the most degraded-
looking men stepped out of the line and hoisted him in.  Now the
virtue and the joy of this act lies in that it was service of love,
not hire.  The carter was poor, and the man knew it; and the man was
standing in the spike line, and the carter knew it; and the man had
done the little act, and the carter had thanked him, even as you and
I would have done and thanked.

Another beautiful touch was that displayed by the "Hopper" and his
"ole woman."  He had been in line about half-an-hour when the "ole
woman" (his mate) came up to him.  She was fairly clad, for her
class, with a weather-worn bonnet on her grey head and a sacking-
covered bundle in her arms.  As she talked to him, he reached
forward, caught the one stray wisp of the white hair that was flying
wild, deftly twirled it between his fingers, and tucked it back
properly behind her ear.  From all of which one may conclude many
things.  He certainly liked her well enough to wish her to be neat
and tidy.  He was proud of her, standing there in the spike line,
and it was his desire that she should look well in the eyes of the
other unfortunates who stood in the spike line.  But last and best,
and underlying all these motives, it was a sturdy affection he bore
her; for man is not prone to bother his head over neatness and
tidiness in a woman for whom he does not care, nor is he likely to
be proud of such a woman.

And I found myself questioning why this man and his mate, hard
workers I knew from their talk, should have to seek a pauper
lodging.  He had pride, pride in his old woman and pride in himself.
When I asked him what he thought I, a greenhorn, might expect to
earn at "hopping," he sized me up, and said that it all depended.
Plenty of people were too slow to pick hops and made a failure of
it.  A man, to succeed, must use his head and be quick with his
fingers, must be exceeding quick with his fingers.  Now he and his
old woman could do very well at it, working the one bin between them
and not going to sleep over it; but then, they had been at it for
years.

"I 'ad a mate as went down last year," spoke up a man.  "It was 'is
fust time, but 'e come back wi' two poun' ten in 'is pockit, an' 'e
was only gone a month."

"There you are," said the Hopper, a wealth of admiration in his
voice.  "'E was quick.  'E was jest nat'rally born to it, 'e was."

Two pound ten--twelve dollars and a half--for a month's work when
one is "jest nat'rally born to it!"  And in addition, sleeping out
without blankets and living the Lord knows how.  There are moments
when I am thankful that I was not "jest nat'rally born" a genius for
anything, not even hop-picking,

In the matter of getting an outfit for "the hops," the Hopper gave
me some sterling advice, to which same give heed, you soft and
tender people, in case you should ever be stranded in London Town.

"If you ain't got tins an' cookin' things, all as you can get'll be
bread and cheese.  No bloomin' good that!  You must 'ave 'ot tea,
an' wegetables, an' a bit o' meat, now an' again, if you're goin' to
do work as is work.  Cawn't do it on cold wittles.  Tell you wot you
do, lad.  Run around in the mornin' an' look in the dust pans.
You'll find plenty o' tins to cook in.  Fine tins, wonderful good
some o' them.  Me an' the ole woman got ours that way."  (He pointed
at the bundle she held, while she nodded proudly, beaming on me with
good-nature and consciousness of success and prosperity.)  "This
overcoat is as good as a blanket," he went on, advancing the skirt
of it that I might feel its thickness.  "An' 'oo knows, I may find a
blanket before long."

Again the old woman nodded and beamed, this time with the dead
certainty that he WOULD find a blanket before long.

"I call it a 'oliday, 'oppin'," he concluded rapturously.  "A tidy
way o' gettin' two or three pounds together an' fixin' up for
winter.  The only thing I don't like"--and here was the rift within
the lute--"is paddin' the 'oof down there."

It was plain the years were telling on this energetic pair, and
while they enjoyed the quick work with the fingers, "paddin' the
'oof," which is walking, was beginning to bear heavily upon them.
And I looked at their grey hairs, and ahead into the future ten
years, and wondered how it would be with them.

I noticed another man and his old woman join the line, both of them
past fifty.  The woman, because she was a woman, was admitted into
the spike; but he was too late, and, separated from his mate, was
turned away to tramp the streets all night.

The street on which we stood, from wall to wall, was barely twenty
feet wide.  The sidewalks were three feet wide.  It was a residence
street.  At least workmen and their families existed in some sort of
fashion in the houses across from us.  And each day and every day,
from one in the afternoon till six, our ragged spike line is the
principal feature of the view commanded by their front doors and
windows.  One workman sat in his door directly opposite us, taking
his rest and a breath of air after the toil of the day.  His wife
came to chat with him.  The doorway was too small for two, so she
stood up.  Their babes sprawled before them.  And here was the spike
line, less than a score of feet away--neither privacy for the
workman, nor privacy for the pauper.  About our feet played the
children of the neighbourhood.  To them our presence was nothing
unusual.  We were not an intrusion.  We were as natural and ordinary
as the brick walls and stone curbs of their environment.  They had
been born to the sight of the spike line, and all their brief days
they had seen it.

At six o'clock the line moved up, and we were admitted in groups of
three.  Name, age, occupation, place of birth, condition of
destitution, and the previous night's "doss," were taken with
lightning-like rapidity by the superintendent; and as I turned I was
startled by a man's thrusting into my hand something that felt like
a brick, and shouting into my ear, "any knives, matches, or
tobacco?"  "No, sir," I lied, as lied every man who entered.  As I
passed downstairs to the cellar, I looked at the brick in my hand,
and saw that by doing violence to the language it might be called
"bread."  By its weight and hardness it certainly must have been
unleavened.

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

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

In fact, I found that I had made a mistake.  I had eaten a hearty
dinner five hours before, and to have done justice to the fare
before me I should have fasted for a couple of days.  The pannikin
contained skilly, three-quarters of a pint, a mixture of Indian corn
and hot water.  The men were dipping their bread into heaps of salt
scattered over the dirty tables.  I attempted the same, but the
bread seemed to stick in my mouth, and I remembered the words of the
Carpenter, "You need a pint of water to eat the bread nicely."

I went over into a dark corner where I had observed other men going
and found the water.  Then I returned and attacked the skilly.  It
was coarse of texture, unseasoned, gross, and bitter.  This
bitterness which lingered persistently in the mouth after the skilly
had passed on, I found especially repulsive.  I struggled manfully,
but was mastered by my qualms, and half-a-dozen mouthfuls of skilly
and bread was the measure of my success.  The man beside me ate his
own share, and mine to boot, scraped the pannikins, and looked
hungrily for more.

"I met a 'towny,' and he stood me too good a dinner," I explained.

"An' I 'aven't 'ad a bite since yesterday mornin'," he replied.

"How about tobacco?" I asked.  "Will the bloke bother with a fellow
now?"

"Oh no," he answered me.  "No bloomin' fear.  This is the easiest
spike goin'.  Y'oughto see some of them.  Search you to the skin."

The pannikins scraped clean, conversation began to spring up.  "This
super'tendent 'ere is always writin' to the papers 'bout us mugs,"
said the man on the other side of me.

"What does he say?" I asked.

"Oh, 'e sez we're no good, a lot o' blackguards an' scoundrels as
won't work.  Tells all the ole tricks I've bin 'earin' for twenty
years an' w'ich I never seen a mug ever do.  Las' thing of 'is I
see, 'e was tellin' 'ow a mug gets out o' the spike, wi' a crust in
'is pockit.  An' w'en 'e sees a nice ole gentleman comin' along the
street 'e chucks the crust into the drain, an' borrows the old
gent's stick to poke it out.  An' then the ole gent gi'es 'im a
tanner."

A roar of applause greeted the time-honoured yarn, and from
somewhere over in the deeper darkness came another voice, orating
angrily:

"Talk o' the country bein' good for tommy [food]; I'd like to see
it.  I jest came up from Dover, an' blessed little tommy I got.
They won't gi' ye a drink o' water, they won't, much less tommy."

"There's mugs never go out of Kent," spoke a second voice, "they
live bloomin' fat all along."

"I come through Kent," went on the first voice, still more angrily,
"an' Gawd blimey if I see any tommy.  An' I always notices as the
blokes as talks about 'ow much they can get, w'en they're in the
spike can eat my share o' skilly as well as their bleedin' own."

"There's chaps in London," said a man across the table from me,
"that get all the tommy they want, an' they never think o' goin' to
the country.  Stay in London the year 'round.  Nor do they think of
lookin' for a kip [place to sleep], till nine or ten o'clock at
night."

A general chorus verified this statement

"But they're bloomin' clever, them chaps," said an admiring voice.

"Course they are," said another voice.  "But it's not the likes of
me an' you can do it.  You got to be born to it, I say.  Them chaps
'ave ben openin' cabs an' sellin' papers since the day they was
born, an' their fathers an' mothers before 'em.  It's all in the
trainin', I say, an' the likes of me an' you 'ud starve at it."

This also was verified by the general chorus, and likewise the
statement that there were "mugs as lives the twelvemonth 'round in
the spike an' never get a blessed bit o' tommy other than spike
skilly an' bread."

"I once got arf a crown in the Stratford spike," said a new voice.
Silence fell on the instant, and all listened to the wonderful tale.
"There was three of us breakin' stones.  Winter-time, an' the cold
was cruel.  T'other two said they'd be blessed if they do it, an'
they didn't; but I kept wearin' into mine to warm up, you know.  An'
then the guardians come, an' t'other chaps got run in for fourteen
days, an' the guardians, w'en they see wot I'd been doin', gives me
a tanner each, five o' them, an' turns me up."

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

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

By seven o'clock we were called away to bathe and go to bed.  We
stripped our clothes, wrapping them up in our coats and buckling our
belts about them, and deposited them in a heaped rack and on the
floor--a beautiful scheme for the spread of vermin.  Then, two by
two, we entered the bathroom.  There were two ordinary tubs, and
this I know:  the two men preceding had washed in that water, we
washed in the same water, and it was not changed for the two men
that followed us.  This I know; but I am also certain that the
twenty-two of us washed in the same water.

I did no more than make a show of splashing some of this dubious
liquid at myself, while I hastily brushed it off with a towel wet
from the bodies of other men.  My equanimity was not restored by
seeing the back of one poor wretch a mass of blood from attacks of
vermin and retaliatory scratching.

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

Many hours passed before I won to sleep.  It was only seven in the
evening, and the voices of children, in shrill outcry, playing in
the street, continued till nearly midnight.  The smell was frightful
and sickening, while my imagination broke loose, and my skin crept
and crawled till I was nearly frantic.  Grunting, groaning, and
snoring arose like the sounds emitted by some sea monster, and
several times, afflicted by nightmare, one or another, by his
shrieks and yells, aroused the lot of us.  Toward morning I was
awakened by a rat or some similar animal on my breast.  In the quick
transition from sleep to waking, before I was completely myself, I
raised a shout to wake the dead.  At any rate, I woke the living,
and they cursed me roundly for my lack of manners.

But morning came, with a six o'clock breakfast of bread and skilly,
which I gave away, and we were told off to our various tasks.  Some
were set to scrubbing and cleaning, others to picking oakum, and
eight of us were convoyed across the street to the Whitechapel
Infirmary where we were set at scavenger work.  This was the method
by which we paid for our skilly and canvas, and I, for one, know
that I paid in full many times over.

Though we had most revolting tasks to perform, our allotment was
considered the best and the other men deemed themselves lucky in
being chosen to perform it.

"Don't touch it, mate, the nurse sez it's deadly," warned my working
partner, as I held open a sack into which he was emptying a garbage
can.

It came from the sick wards, and I told him that I purposed neither
to touch it, nor to allow it to touch me.  Nevertheless, I had to
carry the sack, and other sacks, down five flights of stairs and
empty them in a receptacle where the corruption was speedily
sprinkled with strong disinfectant.

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

They feel, themselves, that the forces of society tend to hurl them
out of existence.  We were sprinkling disinfectant by the mortuary,
when the dead waggon drove up and five bodies were packed into it.
The conversation turned to the "white potion" and "black jack," and
I found they were all agreed that the poor person, man or woman, who
in the Infirmary gave too much trouble or was in a bad way, was
"polished off."  That is to say, the incurables and the obstreperous
were given a dose of "black jack" or the "white potion," and sent
over the divide.  It does not matter in the least whether this be
actually so or not.  The point is, they have the feeling that it is
so, and they have created the language with which to express that
feeling--"black jack" "white potion," "polishing off."

At eight o'clock we went down into a cellar under the infirmary,
where tea was brought to us, and the hospital scraps.  These were
heaped high on a huge platter in an indescribable mess--pieces of
bread, chunks of grease and fat pork, the burnt skin from the
outside of roasted joints, bones, in short, all the leavings from
the fingers and mouths of the sick ones suffering from all manner of
diseases.  Into this mess the men plunged their hands, digging,
pawing, turning over, examining, rejecting, and scrambling for.  It
wasn't pretty.  Pigs couldn't have done worse.  But the poor devils
were hungry, and they ate ravenously of the swill, and when they
could eat no more they bundled what was left into their
handkerchiefs and thrust it inside their shirts.

"Once, w'en I was 'ere before, wot did I find out there but a 'ole
lot of pork-ribs," said Ginger to me.  By "out there" he meant the
place where the corruption was dumped and sprinkled with strong
disinfectant.  "They was a prime lot, no end o' meat on 'em, an' I
'ad 'em into my arms an' was out the gate an' down the street, a-
lookin' for some 'un to gi' 'em to.  Couldn't see a soul, an' I was
runnin' 'round clean crazy, the bloke runnin' after me an' thinkin'
I was 'slingin' my 'ook' [running away].  But jest before 'e got me,
I got a ole woman an' poked 'em into 'er apron."

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

It is the rule of the casual ward that a man who enters must stay
two nights and a day; but I had seen sufficient for my purpose, had
paid for my skilly and canvas, and was preparing to run for it.

"Come on, let's sling it," I said to one of my mates, pointing
toward the open gate through which the dead waggon had come.

"An' get fourteen days?"

"No; get away."

"Aw, I come 'ere for a rest," he said complacently.  "An' another
night's kip won't 'urt me none."

They were all of this opinion, so I was forced to "sling it" alone.

"You cawn't ever come back 'ere again for a doss," they warned me.

"No fear," said I, with an enthusiasm they could not comprehend;
and, dodging out the gate, I sped down the street.

Straight to my room I hurried, changed my clothes, and less than an
hour from my escape, in a Turkish bath, I was sweating out whatever
germs and other things had penetrated my epidermis, and wishing that
I could stand a temperature of three hundred and twenty rather than
two hundred and twenty.



CHAPTER X--CARRYING THE BANNER



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

The rain was falling heavily when the theatres let out, and the
brilliant throng which poured from the places of amusement was hard
put to find cabs.  The streets were so many wild rivers of cabs,
most of which were engaged, however; and here I saw the desperate
attempts of ragged men and boys to get a shelter from the night by
procuring cabs for the cabless ladies and gentlemen.  I use the word
"desperate" advisedly, for these wretched, homeless ones were
gambling a soaking against a bed; and most of them, I took notice,
got the soaking and missed the bed.  Now, to go through a stormy
night with wet clothes, and, in addition, to be ill nourished and
not to have tasted meat for a week or a month, is about as severe a
hardship as a man can undergo.  Well fed and well clad, I have
travelled all day with the spirit thermometer down to seventy-four
degrees below zero--one hundred and six degrees of frost {1}; and
though I suffered, it was a mere nothing compared with carrying the
banner for a night, ill fed, ill clad, and soaking wet.

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

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

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

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

So I sat down on the stone steps of a building.  Five minutes later
a policeman was looking at me.  My eyes were wide open, so he only
grunted and passed on.  Ten minutes later my head was on my knees, I
was dozing, and the same policeman was saying gruffly, "'Ere, you,
get outa that!"

I got.  And, like the old woman, I continued to get; for every time
I dozed, a policeman was there to rout me along again.  Not long
after, when I had given this up, I was walking with a young Londoner
(who had been out to the colonies and wished he were out to them
again), when I noticed an open passage leading under a building and
disappearing in darkness.  A low iron gate barred the entrance.

"Come on," I said.  "Let's climb over and get a good sleep."

"Wot?" he answered, recoiling from me.  "An' get run in fer three
months!  Blimey if I do!"

Later on I was passing Hyde Park with a young boy of fourteen or
fifteen, a most wretched-looking youth, gaunt and hollow-eyed and
sick.

"Let's go over the fence," I proposed, "and crawl into the shrubbery
for a sleep.  The bobbies couldn't find us there."

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

Times have changed, alas!  When I was a youngster I used to read of
homeless boys sleeping in doorways.  Already the thing has become a
tradition.  As a stock situation it will doubtless linger in
literature for a century to come, but as a cold fact it has ceased
to be.  Here are the doorways, and here are the boys, but happy
conjunctions are no longer effected.  The doorways remain empty, and
the boys keep awake and carry the banner.

"I was down under the arches," grumbled another young fellow.  By
"arches" he meant the shore arches where begin the bridges that span
the Thames.  "I was down under the arches wen it was ryning its
'ardest, an' a bobby comes in an' chyses me out.  But I come back,
an' 'e come too.  ''Ere,' sez 'e, 'wot you doin' 'ere?'  An' out I
goes, but I sez, 'Think I want ter pinch [steal] the bleedin'
bridge?'"

Among those who carry the banner, Green Park has the reputation of
opening its gates earlier than the other parks, and at quarter-past
four in the morning, I, and many more, entered Green Park.  It was
raining again, but they were worn out with the night's walking, and
they were down on the benches and asleep at once.  Many of the men
stretched out full length on the dripping wet grass, and, with the
rain falling steadily upon them, were sleeping the sleep of
exhaustion.

And now I wish to criticise the powers that be.  They ARE the
powers, therefore they may decree whatever they please; so I make
bold only to criticise the ridiculousness of their decrees.  All
night long they make the homeless ones walk up and down.  They drive
them out of doors and passages, and lock them out of the parks.  The
evident intention of all this is to deprive them of sleep.  Well and
good, the powers have the power to deprive them of sleep, or of
anything else for that matter; but why under the sun do they open
the gates of the parks at five o'clock in the morning and let the
homeless ones go inside and sleep?  If it is their intention to
deprive them of sleep, why do they let them sleep after five in the
morning?  And if it is not their intention to deprive them of sleep,
why don't they let them sleep earlier in the night?

In this connection, I will say that I came by Green Park that same
day, at one in the afternoon, and that I counted scores of the
ragged wretches asleep in the grass.  It was Sunday afternoon, the
sun was fitfully appearing, and the well-dressed West Enders, with
their wives and progeny, were out by thousands, taking the air.  It
was not a pleasant sight for them, those horrible, unkempt, sleeping
vagabonds; while the vagabonds themselves, I know, would rather have
done their sleeping the night before.

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



CHAPTER XI--THE PEG



But, after carrying the banner all night, I did not sleep in Green
Park when morning dawned.  I was wet to the skin, it is true, and I
had had no sleep for twenty-four hours; but, still adventuring as a
penniless man looking for work, I had to look about me, first for a
breakfast, and next for the work.

During the night I had heard of a place over on the Surrey side of
the Thames, where the Salvation Army every Sunday morning gave away
a breakfast to the unwashed.  (And, by the way, the men who carry
the banner are unwashed in the morning, and unless it is raining
they do not have much show for a wash, either.)  This, thought I, is
the very thing--breakfast in the morning, and then the whole day in
which to look for work.

It was a weary walk.  Down St. James Street I dragged my tired legs,
along Pall Mall, past Trafalgar Square, to the Strand.  I crossed
the Waterloo Bridge to the Surrey side, cut across to Blackfriars
Road, coming out near the Surrey Theatre, and arrived at the
Salvation Army barracks before seven o'clock.  This was "the peg."
And by "the peg," in the argot, is meant the place where a free meal
may be obtained.

Here was a motley crowd of woebegone wretches who had spent the
night in the rain.  Such prodigious misery! and so much of it!  Old
men, young men, all manner of men, and boys to boot, and all manner
of boys.  Some were drowsing standing up; half a score of them were
stretched out on the stone steps in most painful postures, all of
them sound asleep, the skin of their bodies showing red through the
holes, and rents in their rags.  And up and down the street and
across the street for a block either way, each doorstep had from two
to three occupants, all asleep, their heads bent forward on their
knees.  And, it must be remembered, these are not hard times in
England.  Things are going on very much as they ordinarily do, and
times are neither hard nor easy.

And then came the policeman.  "Get outa that, you bloomin' swine!
Eigh! eigh!  Get out now!"  And like swine he drove them from the
doorways and scattered them to the four winds of Surrey.  But when
he encountered the crowd asleep on the steps he was astounded.
"Shocking!" he exclaimed.  "Shocking!  And of a Sunday morning!  A
pretty sight!  Eigh! eigh!  Get outa that, you bleeding nuisances!"

Of course it was a shocking sight, I was shocked myself.  And I
should not care to have my own daughter pollute her eyes with such a
sight, or come within half a mile of it; but--and there we were, and
there you are, and "but" is all that can be said.

The policeman passed on, and back we clustered, like flies around a
honey jar.  For was there not that wonderful thing, a breakfast,
awaiting us?  We could not have clustered more persistently and
desperately had they been giving away million-dollar bank-notes.
Some were already off to sleep, when back came the policeman and
away we scattered only to return again as soon as the coast was
clear.

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

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

At eight-thirty, more men with tickets were admitted, and by nine
the little gate was opened to us.  We crushed through somehow, and
found ourselves packed in a courtyard like sardines.  On more
occasions than one, as a Yankee tramp in Yankeeland, I have had to
work for my breakfast; but for no breakfast did I ever work so hard
as for this one.  For over two hours I had waited outside, and for
over another hour I waited in this packed courtyard.  I had had
nothing to eat all night, and I was weak and faint, while the smell
of the soiled clothes and unwashed bodies, steaming from pent animal
heat, and blocked solidly about me, nearly turned my stomach.  So
tightly were we packed, that a number of the men took advantage of
the opportunity and went soundly asleep standing up.

Now, about the Salvation Army in general I know nothing, and
whatever criticism I shall make here is of that particular portion
of the Salvation Army which does business on Blackfriars Road near
the Surrey Theatre.  In the first place, this forcing of men who
have been up all night to stand on their feet for hours longer, is
as cruel as it is needless.  We were weak, famished, and exhausted
from our night's hardship and lack of sleep, and yet there we stood,
and stood, and stood, without rhyme or reason.

Sailors were very plentiful in this crowd.  It seemed to me that one
man in four was looking for a ship, and I found at least a dozen of
them to be American sailors.  In accounting for their being "on the
beach," I received the same story from each and all, and from my
knowledge of sea affairs this story rang true.  English ships sign
their sailors for the voyage, which means the round trip, sometimes
lasting as long as three years; and they cannot sign off and receive
their discharges until they reach the home port, which is England.
Their wages are low, their food is bad, and their treatment worse.
Very often they are really forced by their captains to desert in the
New World or the colonies, leaving a handsome sum of wages behind
them--a distinct gain, either to the captain or the owners, or to
both.  But whether for this reason alone or not, it is a fact that
large numbers of them desert.  Then, for the home voyage, the ship
engages whatever sailors it can find on the beach.  These men are
engaged at the somewhat higher wages that obtain in other portions
of the world, under the agreement that they shall sign off on
reaching England.  The reason for this is obvious; for it would be
poor business policy to sign them for any longer time, since
seamen's wages are low in England, and England is always crowded
with sailormen on the beach.  So this fully accounted for the
American seamen at the Salvation Army barracks.  To get off the
beach in other outlandish places they had come to England, and gone
on the beach in the most outlandish place of all.

There were fully a score of Americans in the crowd, the non-sailors
being "tramps royal," the men whose "mate is the wind that tramps
the world."  They were all cheerful, facing things with the pluck
which is their chief characteristic and which seems never to desert
them, withal they were cursing the country with lurid metaphors
quite refreshing after a month of unimaginative, monotonous Cockney
swearing.  The Cockney has one oath, and one oath only, the most
indecent in the language, which he uses on any and every occasion.
Far different is the luminous and varied Western swearing, which
runs to blasphemy rather than indecency.  And after all, since men
will swear, I think I prefer blasphemy to indecency; there is an
audacity about it, an adventurousness and defiance that is better
than sheer filthiness.

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

In the jam inside I found myself alongside of him, and we had quite
a chat.  He had been through Spain, Italy, Switzerland, and France,
and had accomplished the practically impossible feat of beating his
way three hundred miles on a French railway without being caught at
the finish.  Where was I hanging out? he asked.  And how did I
manage for "kipping"?--which means sleeping.  Did I know the rounds
yet?  He was getting on, though the country was "horstyl" and the
cities were "bum."  Fierce, wasn't it?  Couldn't "batter" (beg)
anywhere without being "pinched."  But he wasn't going to quit it.
Buffalo Bill's Show was coming over soon, and a man who could drive
eight horses was sure of a job any time.  These mugs over here
didn't know beans about driving anything more than a span.  What was
the matter with me hanging on and waiting for Buffalo Bill?  He was
sure I could ring in somehow.

And so, after all, blood is thicker than water.  We were fellow-
countrymen and strangers in a strange land.  I had warmed to his
battered old hat at sight of it, and he was as solicitous for my
welfare as if we were blood brothers.  We swapped all manner of
useful information concerning the country and the ways of its
people, methods by which to obtain food and shelter and what not,
and we parted genuinely sorry at having to say good-bye.

One thing particularly conspicuous in this crowd was the shortness
of stature.  I, who am but of medium height, looked over the heads
of nine out of ten.  The natives were all short, as were the foreign
sailors.  There were only five or six in the crowd who could be
called fairly tall, and they were Scandinavians and Americans.  The
tallest man there, however, was an exception.  He was an Englishman,
though not a Londoner.  "Candidate for the Life Guards," I remarked
to him.  "You've hit it, mate," was his reply; "I've served my bit
in that same, and the way things are I'll be back at it before
long."

For an hour we stood quietly in this packed courtyard.  Then the men
began to grow restless.  There was pushing and shoving forward, and
a mild hubbub of voices.  Nothing rough, however, nor violent;
merely the restlessness of weary and hungry men.  At this juncture
forth came the adjutant.  I did not like him.  His eyes were not
good.  There was nothing of the lowly Galilean about him, but a
great deal of the centurion who said:  "For I am a man in authority,
having soldiers under me; and I say to this man, Go, and he goeth;
and to another, Come, and he cometh; and to my servant, Do this, and
he doeth it."

Well, he looked at us in just that way, and those nearest to him
quailed.  Then he lifted his voice.

"Stop this 'ere, now, or I'll turn you the other wy an' march you
out, an' you'll get no breakfast."

I cannot convey by printed speech the insufferable way in which he
said this.  He seemed to me to revel in that he was a man in
authority, able to say to half a thousand ragged wretches, "you may
eat or go hungry, as I elect."

To deny us our breakfast after standing for hours!  It was an awful
threat, and the pitiful, abject silence which instantly fell
attested its awfulness.  And it was a cowardly threat.  We could not
strike back, for we were starving; and it is the way of the world
that when one man feeds another he is that man's master.  But the
centurion--I mean the adjutant--was not satisfied.  In the dead
silence he raised his voice again, and repeated the threat, and
amplified it.

At last we were permitted to enter the feasting hall, where we found
the "ticket men" washed but unfed.  All told, there must have been
nearly seven hundred of us who sat down--not to meat or bread, but
to speech, song, and prayer.  From all of which I am convinced that
Tantalus suffers in many guises this side of the infernal regions.
The adjutant made the prayer, but I did not take note of it, being
too engrossed with the massed picture of misery before me.  But the
speech ran something like this:  "You will feast in Paradise.  No
matter how you starve and suffer here, you will feast in Paradise,
that is, if you will follow the directions."  And so forth and so
forth.  A clever bit of propaganda, I took it, but rendered of no
avail for two reasons.  First, the men who received it were
unimaginative and materialistic, unaware of the existence of any
Unseen, and too inured to hell on earth to be frightened by hell to
come.  And second, weary and exhausted from the night's
sleeplessness and hardship, suffering from the long wait upon their
feet, and faint from hunger, they were yearning, not for salvation,
but for grub.  The "soul-snatchers" (as these men call all religious
propagandists), should study the physiological basis of psychology a
little, if they wish to make their efforts more effective.

All in good time, about eleven o'clock, breakfast arrived.  It
arrived, not on plates, but in paper parcels.  I did not have all I
wanted, and I am sure that no man there had all he wanted, or half
of what he wanted or needed.  I gave part of my bread to the tramp
royal who was waiting for Buffalo Bill, and he was as ravenous at
the end as he was in the beginning.  This is the breakfast:  two
slices of bread, one small piece of bread with raisins in it and
called "cake," a wafer of cheese, and a mug of "water bewitched."
Numbers of the men had been waiting since five o'clock for it, while
all of us had waited at least four hours; and in addition, we had
been herded like swine, packed like sardines, and treated like curs,
and been preached at, and sung to, and prayed for.  Nor was that
all.

No sooner was breakfast over (and it was over almost as quickly as
it takes to tell), than the tired heads began to nod and droop, and
in five minutes half of us were sound asleep.  There were no signs
of our being dismissed, while there were unmistakable signs of
preparation for a meeting.  I looked at a small clock hanging on the
wall.  It indicated twenty-five minutes to twelve.  Heigh-ho,
thought I, time is flying, and I have yet to look for work.

"I want to go," I said to a couple of waking men near me.

"Got ter sty fer the service," was the answer.

"Do you want to stay?" I asked.

They shook their heads.

"Then let us go and tell them we want to get out," I continued.
"Come on."

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

"I want to go," I said.  "I came here for breakfast in order that I
might be in shape to look for work.  I didn't think it would take so
long to get breakfast.  I think I have a chance for work in Stepney,
and the sooner I start, the better chance I'll have of getting it."

He was really a good fellow, though he was startled by my request.
"Wy," he said, "we're goin' to 'old services, and you'd better sty."

"But that will spoil my chances for work," I urged.  "And work is
the most important thing for me just now."

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

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

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

"Yes," he snorted.

I do not know what might have happened, for I was waxing indignant
myself; but the "congregation" had "piped" the situation, and he
drew me over to a corner of the room, and then into another room.
Here he again demanded my reasons for wishing to go.

"I want to go," I said, "because I wish to look for work over in
Stepney, and every hour lessens my chance of finding work.  It is
now twenty-five minutes to twelve.  I did not think when I came in
that it would take so long to get a breakfast."

"You 'ave business, eh?" he sneered.  "A man of business you are,
eh?  Then wot did you come 'ere for?"

"I was out all night, and I needed a breakfast in order to
strengthen me to find work.  That is why I came here."

"A nice thing to do," he went on in the same sneering manner.  "A
man with business shouldn't come 'ere.  You've tyken some poor man's
breakfast 'ere this morning, that's wot you've done."

Which was a lie, for every mother's son of us had come in.

Now I submit, was this Christian-like, or even honest?--after I had
plainly stated that I was homeless and hungry, and that I wished to
look for work, for him to call my looking for work "business," to
call me therefore a business man, and to draw the corollary that a
man of business, and well off, did not require a charity breakfast,
and that by taking a charity breakfast I had robbed some hungry waif
who was not a man of business.

I kept my temper, but I went over the facts again, and clearly and
concisely demonstrated to him how unjust he was and how he had
perverted the facts.  As I manifested no signs of backing down (and
I am sure my eyes were beginning to snap), he led me to the rear of
the building where, in an open court, stood a tent.  In the same
sneering tone he informed a couple of privates standing there that
"'ere is a fellow that 'as business an' 'e wants to go before
services."

They were duly shocked, of course, and they looked unutterable
horror while he went into the tent and brought out the major.  Still
in the same sneering manner, laying particular stress on the
"business," he brought my case before the commanding officer.  The
major was of a different stamp of man.  I liked him as soon as I saw
him, and to him I stated my case in the same fashion m before.

"Didn't you know you had to stay for services?" he asked.

"Certainly not," I answered, "or I should have gone without my
breakfast.  You have no placards posted to that effect, nor was I so
informed when I entered the place."

He meditated a moment.  "You can go," he said.

It was twelve o'clock when I gained the street, and I couldn't quite
make up my mind whether I had been in the army or in prison.  The
day was half gone, and it was a far fetch to Stepney.  And besides,
it was Sunday, and why should even a starving man look for work on
Sunday?  Furthermore, it was my judgment that I had done a hard
night's work walking the streets, and a hard day's work getting my
breakfast; so I disconnected myself from my working hypothesis of a
starving young man in search of employment, hailed a bus, and
climbed aboard.

After a shave and a bath, with my clothes all off, I got in between
clean white sheets and went to sleep.  It was six in the evening
when I closed my eyes.  When they opened again, the clocks were
striking nine next morning.  I had slept fifteen straight hours.
And as I lay there drowsily, my mind went back to the seven hundred
unfortunates I had left waiting for services.  No bath, no shave for
them, no clean white sheets and all clothes off, and fifteen hours'
straight sleep.  Services over, it was the weary streets again, the
problem of a crust of bread ere night, and the long sleepless night
in the streets, and the pondering of the problem of how to obtain a
crust at dawn.



CHAPTER XII--CORONATION DAY



O thou that sea-walls sever
From lands unwalled by seas!
Wilt thou endure forever,
O Milton's England, these?
Thou that wast his Republic,
Wilt thou clasp their knees?
These royalties rust-eaten,
These worm-corroded lies
That keep thy head storm-beaten,
And sun-like strength of eyes
From the open air and heaven
Of intercepted skies!

- SWINBURNE.



Vivat Rex Eduardus!  They crowned a king this day, and there has
been great rejoicing and elaborate tomfoolery, and I am perplexed
and saddened.  I never saw anything to compare with the pageant,
except Yankee circuses and Alhambra ballets; nor did I ever see
anything so hopeless and so tragic.

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

I saw it at Trafalgar Square, "the most splendid site in Europe,"
and the very innermost heart of the empire.  There were many
thousands of us, all checked and held in order by a superb display
of armed power.  The line of march was double-walled with soldiers.
The base of the Nelson Column was triple-fringed with bluejackets.
Eastward, at the entrance to the square, stood the Royal Marine
Artillery.  In the triangle of Pall Mall and Cockspur Street, the
statue of George III. was buttressed on either side by the Lancers
and Hussars.  To the west were the red-coats of the Royal Marines,
and from the Union Club to the embouchure of Whitehall swept the
glittering, massive curve of the 1st Life Guards--gigantic men
mounted on gigantic chargers, steel-breastplated, steel-helmeted,
steel-caparisoned, a great war-sword of steel ready to the hand of
the powers that be.  And further, throughout the crowd, were flung
long lines of the Metropolitan Constabulary, while in the rear were
the reserves--tall, well-fed men, with weapons to wield and muscles
to wield them in ease of need.

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

There is a Chinese proverb that if one man lives in laziness another
will die of hunger; and Montesquieu has said, "The fact that many
men are occupied in making clothes for one individual is the cause
of there being many people without clothes."  So one explains the
other.  We cannot understand the starved and runty {2} toiler of the
East End (living with his family in a one-room den, and letting out
the floor space for lodgings to other starved and runty toilers)
till we look at the strapping Life Guardsmen of the West End, and
come to know that the one must feed and clothe and groom the other.

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


And the Lord said unto Samuel:  Now therefore hearken unto their
voice; howbeit thou shalt show them the manner of the king that
shall reign over them.

And Samuel told all the words of the Lord unto the people that asked
of him a king, and he said:

This will be the manner of the king that shall reign over you; he
will take your sons, and appoint them unto him, for his chariots,
and to be his horsemen, and they shall run before his chariots.

And he will appoint them unto him for captains of thousands, and
captains of fifties; and he will set some to plough his ground, and
to reap his harvest, and to make his instruments of war, and the
instruments of his chariots.

And he will take your daughters to be confectionaries, and to be
cooks, and to be bakers.

And he will take your fields and your vineyards, and your
oliveyards, even the best of them, and give them to his servants.

And he will take a tenth of your seed, and of your vineyards, and
give to his officers, and to his servants.

And he will take your menservants, and your maidservants, and your
goodliest young men, and your asses, and put them to his work.

He will take a tenth of your flocks; and ye shall be his servants.

And ye shall call out in that day because of your king which ye
shall have chosen you; and the Lord will not answer you in that day.


All of which came to pass in that ancient day, and they did cry out
to Samuel, saying:  "Pray for thy servants unto the Lord thy God,
that we die not; for we have added unto all our sins this evil, to
ask us a king."  And after Saul, David, and Solomon, came Rehoboam,
who "answered the people roughly, saying:  My father made your yoke
heavy, but I will add to your yoke; my father chastised you with
whips, but I will chastise you with scorpions."

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

At the Abbey, clad in wonderful golden raiment, amid fanfare of
trumpets and throbbing of music, surrounded by a brilliant throng of
masters, lords, and rulers, the King was being invested with the
insignia of his sovereignty.  The spurs were placed to his heels by
the Lord Great Chamberlain, and a sword of state, in purple
scabbard, was presented him by the Archbishop of Canterbury, with
these words:-


Receive this kingly sword brought now from the altar of God, and
delivered to you by the hands of the bishops and servants of God,
though unworthy.


Whereupon, being girded, he gave heed to the Archbishop's
exhortation:-


With this sword do justice, stop the growth of iniquity, protect the
Holy Church of God, help and defend widows and orphans, restore the
things that are gone to decay, maintain the things that are
restored, punish and reform what is amiss, and confirm what is in
good order.


But hark!  There is cheering down Whitehall; the crowd sways, the
double walls of soldiers come to attention, and into view swing the
King's watermen, in fantastic mediaeval garbs of red, for all the
world like the van of a circus parade.  Then a royal carriage,
filled with ladies and gentlemen of the household, with powdered
footmen and coachmen most gorgeously arrayed.  More carriages,
lords, and chamberlains, viscounts, mistresses of the robes--lackeys
all.  Then the warriors, a kingly escort, generals, bronzed and
worn, from the ends of the earth come up to London Town, volunteer
officers, officers of the militia and regular forces; Spens and
Plumer, Broadwood and Cooper who relieved Ookiep, Mathias of Dargai,
Dixon of Vlakfontein; General Gaselee and Admiral Seymour of China;
Kitchener of Khartoum; Lord Roberts of India and all the world--the
fighting men of England, masters of destruction, engineers of death!
Another race of men from those of the shops and slums, a totally
different race of men.

But here they come, in all the pomp and certitude of power, and
still they come, these men of steel, these war lords and world
harnessers.  Pell-mell, peers and commoners, princes and maharajahs,
Equerries to the King and Yeomen of the Guard.  And here the
colonials, lithe and hardy men; and here all the breeds of all the
world-soldiers from Canada, Australia, New Zealand; from Bermuda,
Borneo, Fiji, and the Gold Coast; from Rhodesia, Cape Colony, Natal,
Sierra Leone and Gambia, Nigeria, and Uganda; from Ceylon, Cyprus,
Hong-Kong, Jamaica, and Wei-Hai-Wei; from Lagos, Malta, St. Lucia,
Singapore, Trinidad.  And here the conquered men of Ind, swarthy
horsemen and sword wielders, fiercely barbaric, blazing in crimson
and scarlet, Sikhs, Rajputs, Burmese, province by province, and
caste by caste.

And now the Horse Guards, a glimpse of beautiful cream ponies, and a
golden panoply, a hurricane of cheers, the crashing of bands--"The
King! the King!  God save the King!"  Everybody has gone mad.  The
contagion is sweeping me off my feet--I, too, want to shout, "The
King!  God save the King!"  Ragged men about me, tears in their
eyes, are tossing up their hats and crying ecstatically, "Bless 'em!
Bless 'em!  Bless 'em!"  See, there he is, in that wondrous golden
coach, the great crown flashing on his head, the woman in white
beside him likewise crowned.

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

Princes and princelings, dukes, duchesses, and all manner of
coroneted folk of the royal train are flashing past; more warriors,
and lackeys, and conquered peoples, and the pagent is over.  I drift
with the crowd out of the square into a tangle of narrow streets,
where the public-houses are a-roar with drunkenness, men, women, and
children mixed together in colossal debauch.  And on every side is
rising the favourite song of the Coronation:-


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


The rain is pouring down.  Up the street come troops of the
auxiliaries, black Africans and yellow Asiatics, beturbaned and
befezed, and coolies swinging along with machine guns and mountain
batteries on their heads, and the bare feet of all, in quick rhythm,
going slish, slish, slish through the pavement mud.  The public-
houses empty by magic, and the swarthy allegiants are cheered by
their British brothers, who return at once to the carouse.

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

"'Ow did I like it?  A bloomin' good chawnce, sez I to myself, for a
sleep, wi' all the coppers aw'y, so I turned into the corner there,
along wi' fifty others.  But I couldn't sleep, a-lyin' there an'
thinkin' 'ow I'd worked all the years o' my life an' now 'ad no
plyce to rest my 'ead; an' the music comin' to me, an' the cheers
an' cannon, till I got almost a hanarchist an' wanted to blow out
the brains o' the Lord Chamberlain."

Why the Lord Chamberlain I could not precisely see, nor could he,
but that was the way he felt, he said conclusively, and them was no
more discussion.

As night drew on, the city became a blaze of light.  Splashes of
colour, green, amber, and ruby, caught the eye at every point, and
"E. R.," in great crystal letters and backed by flaming gas, was
everywhere.  The crowds in the streets increased by hundreds of
thousands, and though the police sternly put down mafficking,
drunkenness and rough play abounded.  The tired workers seemed to
have gone mad with the relaxation and excitement, and they surged
and danced down the streets, men and women, old and young, with
linked arms and in long rows, singing, "I may be crazy, but I love
you," "Dolly Gray," and "The Honeysuckle and the Bee"--the last
rendered something like this:-


"Yew aw the enny, ennyseckle, Oi em ther bee,
Oi'd like ter sip ther enny from those red lips, yew see."


I sat on a bench on the Thames Embankment, looking across the
illuminated water.  It was approaching midnight, and before me
poured the better class of merrymakers, shunning the more riotous
streets and returning home.  On the bench beside me sat two ragged
creatures, a man and a woman, nodding and dozing.  The woman sat
with her arms clasped across the breast, holding tightly, her body
in constant play--now dropping forward till it seemed its balance
would be overcome and she would fall to the pavement; now inclining
to the left, sideways, till her head rested on the man's shoulder;
and now to the right, stretched and strained, till the pain of it
awoke her and she sat bolt upright.  Whereupon the dropping forward
would begin again and go through its cycle till she was aroused by
the strain and stretch.

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

This was the most striking thing, the general heartlessness
exhibited on every hand.  It is a commonplace, the homeless on the
benches, the poor miserable folk who may be teased and are harmless.
Fifty thousand people must have passed the bench while I sat upon
it, and not one, on such a jubilee occasion as the crowning of the
King, felt his heart-strings touched sufficiently to come up and say
to the woman:  "Here's sixpence; go and get a bed."  But the women,
especially the young women, made witty remarks upon the woman
nodding, and invariably set their companions laughing.

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

I talked with the man.  He was fifty-four and a broken-down docker.
He could only find odd work when there was a large demand for
labour, for the younger and stronger men were preferred when times
were slack.  He had spent a week, now, on the benches of the
Embankment; but things looked brighter for next week, and he might
possibly get in a few days' work and have a bed in some doss-house.
He had lived all his life in London, save for five years, when, in
1878, he saw foreign service in India.

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

"Wot a lot o' work puttin' up the lights," said the man at sight of
some building superbly illuminated.  This was the keynote of his
being.  All his fife he had worked, and the whole objective
universe, as well as his own soul, he could express in terms only of
work.  "Coronations is some good," he went on.  "They give work to
men."

"But your belly is empty," I said.

"Yes," he answered.  "I tried, but there wasn't any chawnce.  My age
is against me.  Wot do you work at?  Seafarin' chap, eh?  I knew it
from yer clothes."

"I know wot you are," said the girl, "an Eyetalian."

"No 'e ayn't," the man cried heatedly.  "'E's a Yank, that's wot 'e
is.  I know."

"Lord lumne, look a' that," she exclaimed, as we debauched upon the
Strand, choked with the roaring, reeling Coronation crowd, the men
bellowing and the girls singing in high throaty notes:-


"Oh! on Coronation D'y, on Coronation D'y,
We'll 'ave a spree, a jubilee, an' shout 'Ip, 'ip, 'ooray;
For we'll all be merry, drinkin' whisky, wine, and sherry,
We'll all be merry on Coronation D'y."


"'Ow dirty I am, bein' around the w'y I 'ave," the woman said, as
she sat down in a coffee-house, wiping the sleep and grime from the
corners of her eyes.  "An' the sights I 'ave seen this d'y, an' I
enjoyed it, though it was lonesome by myself.  An' the duchesses an'
the lydies 'ad sich gran' w'ite dresses.  They was jest bu'ful,
bu'ful."

"I'm Irish," she said, in answer to a question.  "My nyme's
Eyethorne."

"What?" I asked.

"Eyethorne, sir; Eyethorne."

"Spell it."

"H-a-y-t-h-o-r-n-e, Eyethorne.'

"Oh," I said, "Irish Cockney."

"Yes, sir, London-born."

She had lived happily at home till her father died, killed in an
accident, when she had found herself on the world.  One brother was
in the army, and the other brother, engaged in keeping a wife and
eight children on twenty shillings a week and unsteady employment,
could do nothing for her.  She had been out of London once in her
life, to a place in Essex, twelve miles away, where she had picked
fruit for three weeks:  "An' I was as brown as a berry w'en I come
back.  You won't b'lieve it, but I was."

The last place in which she had worked was a coffee-house, hours
from seven in the morning till eleven at night, and for which she
had received five shillings a week and her food.  Then she had
fallen sick, and since emerging from the hospital had been unable to
find anything to do.  She wasn't feeling up to much, and the last
two nights had been spent in the street.

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

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

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

"Work'ouse," said he.

"Gawd blimey if I do," said she.  "There's no 'ope for me, I know,
but I'll die on the streets.  No work'ouse for me, thank you.  No,
indeed," she sniffed in the silence that fell.

"After you have been out all night in the streets," I asked, "what
do you do in the morning for something to eat?"

"Try to get a penny, if you 'aven't one saved over," the man
explained.  "Then go to a coffee-'ouse an' get a mug o' tea."

"But I don't see how that is to feed you," I objected.

The pair smiled knowingly.

"You drink your tea in little sips," he went on, "making it last its
longest.  An' you look sharp, an' there's some as leaves a bit
be'ind 'em."

"It's s'prisin', the food wot some people leaves," the woman broke
in.

"The thing," said the man judicially, as the trick dawned upon me,
"is to get 'old o' the penny."

As we started to leave, Miss Haythorne gathered up a couple of
crusts from the neighbouring tables and thrust them somewhere into
her rags.

"Cawn't wyste 'em, you know," said she; to which the docker nodded,
tucking away a couple of crusts himself.

At three in the morning I strolled up the Embankment.  It was a gala
night for the homeless, for the police were elsewhere; and each
bench was jammed with sleeping occupants.  There were as many women
as men, and the great majority of them, male and female, were old.
Occasionally a boy was to be seen.  On one bench I noticed a family,
a man sitting upright with a sleeping babe in his arms, his wife
asleep, her head on his shoulder, and in her lap the head of a
sleeping youngster.  The man's eyes were wide open.  He was staring
out over the water and thinking, which is not a good thing for a
shelterless man with a family to do.  It would not be a pleasant
thing to speculate upon his thoughts; but this I know, and all
London knows, that the cases of out-of-works killing their wives and
babies is not an uncommon happening.

One cannot walk along the Thames Embankment, in the small hours of
morning, from the Houses of Parliament, past Cleopatra's Needle, to
Waterloo Bridge, without being reminded of the sufferings, seven and
twenty centuries old, recited by the author of "Job":-


There are that remove the landmarks; they violently take away flocks
and feed them.

They drive away the ass of the fatherless, they take the widow's ox
for a pledge.

They turn the needy out of the way; the poor of the earth hide
themselves together.

Behold, as wild asses in the desert they go forth to their work,
seeking diligently for meat; the wilderness yieldeth them food for
their children.

They cut their provender in the field, and they glean the vintage of
the wicked.

They lie all night naked without clothing, and have no covering in
the cold.

They are wet with the showers of the mountains, and embrace the rock
for want of a shelter.

There are that pluck the fatherless from the breast, and take a
pledge of the poor.

So that they go about naked without clothing, and being an hungered
they carry the sheaves.--Job xxiv. 2-10.


Seven and twenty centuries agone!  And it is all as true and
apposite to-day in the innermost centre of this Christian
civilisation whereof Edward VII. is king.



CHAPTER XIII--DAN CULLEN, DOCKER



I stood, yesterday, in a room in one of the "Municipal Dwellings,"
not far from Leman Street.  If I looked into a dreary future and saw
that I would have to live in such a room until I died, I should
immediately go down, plump into the Thames, and cut the tenancy
short.

It was not a room.  Courtesy to the language will no more permit it
to be called a room than it will permit a hovel to be called a
mansion.  It was a den, a lair.  Seven feet by eight were its
dimensions, and the ceiling was so low as not to give the cubic air
space required by a British soldier in barracks.  A crazy couch,
with ragged coverlets, occupied nearly half the room.  A rickety
table, a chair, and a couple of boxes left little space in which to
turn around.  Five dollars would have purchased everything in sight.
The floor was bare, while the walls and ceiling were literally
covered with blood marks and splotches.  Each mark represented a
violent death--of an insect, for the place swarmed with vermin, a
plague with which no person could cope single-handed.

The man who had occupied this hole, one Dan Cullen, docker, was
dying in hospital.  Yet he had impressed his personality on his
miserable surroundings sufficiently to give an inkling as to what
sort of man he was.  On the walls were cheap pictures of Garibaldi,
Engels, Dan Burns, and other labour leaders, while on the table lay
one of Walter Besant's novels.  He knew his Shakespeare, I was told,
and had read history, sociology, and economics.  And he was self-
educated.

On the table, amidst a wonderful disarray, lay a sheet of paper on
which was scrawled:  Mr. Cullen, please return the large white jug
and corkscrew I lent you--articles loaned, during the first stages
of his sickness, by a woman neighbour, and demanded back in
anticipation of his death.  A large white jug and a corkscrew are
far too valuable to a creature of the Abyss to permit another
creature to die in peace.  To the last, Dan Cullen's soul must be
harrowed by the sordidness out of which it strove vainly to rise.

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

He did not cringe to other men, even though they were his economic
masters, and controlled the means whereby he lived, and he spoke his
mind freely, and fought the good fight.  In the "Great Dock Strike"
he was guilty of taking a leading part.  And that was the end of Dan
Cullen.  From that day he was a marked man, and every day, for ten
years and more, he was "paid off" for what he had done.

A docker is a casual labourer.  Work ebbs and flows, and he works or
does not work according to the amount of goods on hand to be moved.
Dan Cullen was discriminated against.  While he was not absolutely
turned away (which would have caused trouble, and which would
certainly have been more merciful), he was called in by the foreman
to do not more than two or three days' work per week.  This is what
is called being "disciplined," or "drilled."  It means being
starved.  There is no politer word.  Ten years of it broke his
heart, and broken-hearted men cannot live.

He took to his bed in his terrible den, which grew more terrible
with his helplessness.  He was without kith or kin, a lonely old
man, embittered and pessimistic, fighting vermin the while and
looking at Garibaldi, Engels, and Dan Burns gazing down at him from
the blood-bespattered walls.  No one came to see him in that crowded
municipal barracks (he had made friends with none of them), and he
was left to rot.

But from the far reaches of the East End came a cobbler and his son,
his sole friends.  They cleansed his room, brought fresh linen from
home, and took from off his limbs the sheets, greyish-black with
dirt.  And they brought to him one of the Queen's Bounty nurses from
Aldgate.

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

Dan Cullen's feet became swollen with dropsy.  He sat up all day on
the side of the bed (to keep the water out of his body), no mat on
the floor, a thin blanket on his legs, and an old coat around his
shoulders.  A missionary brought him a pair of paper slippers, worth
fourpence (I saw them), and proceeded to offer up fifty prayers or
so for the good of Dan Cullen's soul.  But Dan Cullen was the sort
of man that wanted his soul left alone.  He did not care to have
Tom, Dick, or Harry, on the strength of fourpenny slippers,
tampering with it.  He asked the missionary kindly to open the
window, so that he might toss the slippers out.  And the missionary
went away, to return no more, likewise impressed with the
ungratefulness of the poor.

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

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

Nor did they do anything, not even sign a letter asking for Dan
Cullen's admission to a hospital.  And it is not so easy to get into
a hospital in London Town.  At Hampstead, if he passed the doctors,
at least four months would elapse before he could get in, there were
so many on the books ahead of him.  The cobbler finally got him into
the Whitechapel Infirmary, where he visited him frequently.  Here he
found that Dan Cullen had succumbed to the prevalent feeling, that,
being hopeless, they were hurrying him out of the way.  A fair and
logical conclusion, one must agree, for an old and broken man to
arrive at, who has been resolutely "disciplined" and "drilled" for
ten years.  When they sweated him for Bright's disease to remove the
fat from the kidneys, Dan Cullen contended that the sweating was
hastening his death; while Bright's disease, being a wasting away of
the kidneys, there was therefore no fat to remove, and the doctor's
excuse was a palpable lie.  Whereupon the doctor became wroth, and
did not come near him for nine days.

Then his bed was tilted up so that his feet and legs were elevated.
At once dropsy appeared in the body, and Dan Cullen contended that
the thing was done in order to run the water down into his body from
his legs and kill him more quickly.  He demanded his discharge,
though they told him he would die on the stairs, and dragged
himself, more dead than alive, to the cobbler's shop.  At the moment
of writing this, he is dying at the Temperance Hospital, into which
place his staunch friend, the cobbler, moved heaven and earth to
have him admitted.

Poor Dan Cullen!  A Jude the Obscure, who reached out after
knowledge; who toiled with his body in the day and studied in the
watches of the night; who dreamed his dream and struck valiantly for
the Cause; a patriot, a lover of human freedom, and a fighter
unafraid; and in the end, not gigantic enough to beat down the
conditions which baffled and stifled him, a cynic and a pessimist,
gasping his final agony on a pauper's couch in a charity ward,--"For
a man to die who might have been wise and was not, this I call a
tragedy."



CHAPTER XIV--HOPS AND HOPPERS



So far has the divorcement of the worker from the soil proceeded,
that the farming districts, the civilised world over, are dependent
upon the cities for the gathering of the harvests.  Then it is, when
the land is spilling its ripe wealth to waste, that the street folk,
who have been driven away from the soil, are called back to it
again.  But in England they return, not as prodigals, but as
outcasts still, as vagrants and pariahs, to be doubted and flouted
by their country brethren, to sleep in jails and casual wards, or
under the hedges, and to live the Lord knows how.

It is estimated that Kent alone requires eighty thousand of the
street people to pick her hops.  And out they come, obedient to the
call, which is the call of their bellies and of the lingering dregs
of adventure-lust still in them.  Slum, stews, and ghetto pour them
forth, and the festering contents of slum, stews, and ghetto are
undiminished.  Yet they overrun the country like an army of ghouls,
and the country does not want them.  They are out of place.  As they
drag their squat, misshapen bodies along the highways and byways,
they resemble some vile spawn from underground.  Their very
presence, the fact of their existence, is an outrage to the fresh,
bright sun and the green and growing things.  The clean, upstanding
trees cry shame upon them and their withered crookedness, and their
rottenness is a slimy desecration of the sweetness and purity of
nature.

Is the picture overdrawn?  It all depends.  For one who sees and
thinks life in terms of shares and coupons, it is certainly
overdrawn.  But for one who sees and thinks life in terms of manhood
and womanhood, it cannot be overdrawn.  Such hordes of beastly
wretchedness and inarticulate misery are no compensation for a
millionaire brewer who lives in a West End palace, sates himself
with the sensuous delights of London's golden theatres, hobnobs with
lordlings and princelings, and is knighted by the king.  Wins his
spurs--God forbid!  In old time the great blonde beasts rode in the
battle's van and won their spurs by cleaving men from pate to chine.
And, after all, it is finer to kill a strong man with a clean-
slicing blow of singing steel than to make a beast of him, and of
his seed through the generations, by the artful and spidery
manipulation of industry and politics.

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

Small as the acreage is this year, a poor summer and terrible storms
reduced the yield.  This misfortune is divided between the people
who own hops and the people who pick hops.  The owners perforce must
put up with less of the nicer things of life, the pickers with less
grub, of which, in the best of times, they never get enough.  For
weary weeks headlines like the following have appeared in the London
papers.-


TRAMPS PLENTIFUL, BUT THE HOPS ARE FEW AND NOT YET READY.


Then there have been numberless paragraphs like this:-


From the neighbourhood of the hop fields comes news of a distressing
nature.  The bright outburst of the last two days has sent many
hundreds of hoppers into Kent, who will have to wait till the fields
are ready for them.  At Dover the number of vagrants in the
workhouse is treble the number there last year at this time, and in
other towns the lateness of the season is responsible for a large
increase in the number of casuals.


To cap their wretchedness, when at last the picking had begun, hops
and hoppers were well-nigh swept away by a frightful storm of wind,
rain, and hail.  The hops were stripped clean from the poles and
pounded into the earth, while the hoppers, seeking shelter from the
stinging hail, were close to drowning in their huts and camps on the
low-lying ground.  Their condition after the storm was pitiable,
their state of vagrancy more pronounced than ever; for, poor crop
that it was, its destruction had taken away the chance of earning a
few pennies, and nothing remained for thousands of them but to "pad
the hoof" back to London.

"We ayn't crossin'-sweepers," they said, turning away from the
ground, carpeted ankle-deep with hops.

Those that remained grumbled savagely among the half-stripped poles
at the seven bushels for a shilling--a rate paid in good seasons
when the hops are in prime condition, and a rate likewise paid in
bad seasons by the growers because they cannot afford more.

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

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

To see how William Buggles and his kind fared, I donned my seafaring
togs and started out to get a job.  With me was a young East London
cobbler, Bert, who had yielded to the lure of adventure and joined
me for the trip.  Acting on my advice, he had brought his "worst
rags," and as we hiked up the London road out of Maidstone he was
worrying greatly for fear we had come too ill-dressed for the
business.

Nor was he to be blamed.  When we stopped in a tavern the publican
eyed us gingerly, nor did his demeanour brighten till we showed him
the colour of our cash.  The natives along the coast were all
dubious; and "bean-feasters" from London, dashing past in coaches,
cheered and jeered and shouted insulting things after us.  But
before we were done with the Maidstone district my friend found that
we were as well clad, if not better, than the average hopper.  Some
of the bunches of rags we chanced upon were marvellous.

"The tide is out," called a gypsy-looking woman to her mates, as we
came up a long row of bins into which the pickers were stripping the
hops.

"Do you twig?" Bert whispered.  "She's on to you."

I twigged.  And it must be confessed the figure was an apt one.
When the tide is out boats are left on the beach and do not sail,
and a sailor, when the tide is out, does not sail either.  My
seafaring togs and my presence in the hop field proclaimed that I
was a seaman without a ship, a man on the beach, and very like a
craft at low water.

"Can yer give us a job, governor?" Bert asked the bailiff, a kindly
faced and elderly man who was very busy.

His "No" was decisively uttered; but Bert clung on and followed him
about, and I followed after, pretty well all over the field.
Whether our persistency struck the bailiff as anxiety to work, or
whether he was affected by our hard-luck appearance and tale,
neither Bert nor I succeeded in making out; but in the end he
softened his heart and found us the one unoccupied bin in the place-
-a bin deserted by two other men, from what I could learn, because
of inability to make living wages.

"No bad conduct, mind ye," warned the bailiff, as he left us at work
in the midst of the women.

It was Saturday afternoon, and we knew quitting time would come
early; so we applied ourselves earnestly to the task, desiring to
learn if we could at least make our salt.  It was simple work,
woman's work, in fact, and not man's.  We sat on the edge of the
bin, between the standing hops, while a pole-puller supplied us with
great fragrant branches.  In an hour's time we became as expert as
it is possible to become.  As soon as the fingers became accustomed
automatically to differentiate between hops and leaves and to strip
half-a-dozen blossoms at a time there was no more to learn.

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

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

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

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

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

Whereupon we both lamented our negligence in not rearing up a
numerous progeny to help us in this day of need.  And in such
fashion we whiled away the time and talked for the edification of
our neighbours.  We quite won the sympathy of the pole-puller, a
young country yokel, who now and again emptied a few picked blossoms
into our bin, it being part of his business to gather up the stray
clusters torn off in the process of pulling.

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

After all, it was pleasant sitting there in the bright sunshine, the
golden pollen showering from our hands, the pungent aromatic odour
of the hops biting our nostrils, and the while remembering dimly the
sounding cities whence these people came.  Poor street people!  Poor
gutter folk!  Even they grow earth-hungry, and yearn vaguely for the
soil from which they have been driven, and for the free life in the
open, and the wind and rain and sun all undefiled by city smirches.
As the sea calls to the sailor, so calls the land to them; and, deep
down in their aborted and decaying carcasses, they are stirred
strangely by the peasant memories of their forbears who lived before
cities were.  And in incomprehensible ways they are made glad by the
earth smells and sights and sounds which their blood has not
forgotten though unremembered by them.

"No more 'ops, matey," Bert complained.

It was five o'clock, and the pole-pullers had knocked off, so that
everything could be cleaned up, there being no work on Sunday.  For
an hour we were forced idly to wait the coming of the measurers, our
feet tingling with the frost which came on the heels of the setting
sun.  In the adjoining bin, two women and half-a-dozen children had
picked nine bushels:  so that the five bushels the measurers found
in our bin demonstrated that we had done equally well, for the half-
dozen children had ranged from nine to fourteen years of age.

Five bushels!  We worked it out to eight-pence ha'penny, or
seventeen cents, for two men working three hours and a half.
Fourpence farthing apiece! a little over a penny an hour!  But we
were allowed only to "sub" fivepence of the total sum, though the
tally-keeper, short of change, gave us sixpence.  Entreaty was in
vain.  A hard-luck story could not move him.  He proclaimed loudly
that we had received a penny more than our due, and went his way.

Granting, for the sake of the argument, that we were what we
represented ourselves to be--namely, poor men and broke--then here
was out position:  night was coming on; we had had no supper, much
less dinner; and we possessed sixpence between us.  I was hungry
enough to eat three sixpenn'orths of food, and so was Bert.  One
thing was patent.  By doing 16.3 per cent. justice to our stomachs,
we would expend the sixpence, and our stomachs would still be
gnawing under 83.3 per cent. injustice.  Being broke again, we could
sleep under a hedge, which was not so bad, though the cold would sap
an undue portion of what we had eaten.  But the morrow was Sunday,
on which we could do no work, though our silly stomachs would not
knock off on that account.  Here, then, was the problem:  how to get
three meals on Sunday, and two on Monday (for we could not make
another "sub" till Monday evening).

We knew that the casual wards were over-crowded; also, that if we
begged from farmer or villager, there was a large likelihood of our
going to jail for fourteen days.  What was to be done?  We looked at
each other in despair -

- Not a bit of it.  We joyfully thanked God that we were not as
other men, especially hoppers, and went down the road to Maidstone,
jingling in our pockets the half-crowns and florins we had brought
from London.



CHAPTER XV--THE SEA WIFE



You might not expect to find the Sea Wife in the heart of Kent, but
that is where I found her, in a mean street, in the poor quarter of
Maidstone.  In her window she had no sign of lodgings to let, and
persuasion was necessary before she could bring herself to let me
sleep in her front room.  In the evening I descended to the semi-
subterranean kitchen, and talked with her and her old man, Thomas
Mugridge by name.

And as I talked to them, all the subtleties and complexities of this
tremendous machine civilisation vanished away.  It seemed that I
went down through the skin and the flesh to the naked soul of it,
and in Thomas Mugridge and his old woman gripped hold of the essence
of this remarkable English breed.  I found there the spirit of the
wanderlust which has lured Albion's sons across the zones; and I
found there the colossal unreckoning which has tricked the English
into foolish squabblings and preposterous fights, and the doggedness
and stubbornness which have brought them blindly through to empire
and greatness; and likewise I found that vast, incomprehensible
patience which has enabled the home population to endure under the
burden of it all, to toil without complaint through the weary years,
and docilely to yield the best of its sons to fight and colonise to
the ends of the earth.

Thomas Mugridge was seventy-one years old and a little man.  It was
because he was little that he had not gone for a soldier.  He had
remained at home and worked.  His first recollections were connected
with work.  He knew nothing else but work.  He had worked all his
days, and at seventy-one he still worked.  Each morning saw him up
with the lark and afield, a day labourer, for as such he had been
born.  Mrs. Mugridge was seventy-three.  From seven years of age she
had worked in the fields, doing a boy's work at first, and later a
man's.  She still worked, keeping the house shining, washing,
boiling, and baking, and, with my advent, cooking for me and shaming
me by making my bed.  At the end of threescore years and more of
work they possessed nothing, had nothing to look forward to save
more work.  And they were contented.  They expected nothing else,
desired nothing else.

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

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

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

"We'll work till we dry up and blow away, mother an' me," he added;
and Mrs. Mugridge nodded her head in vigorous indorsement.

Fifteen children she had borne, and all were away and gone, or dead.
The "baby," however, lived in Maidstone, and she was twenty-seven.
When the children married they had their hands full with their own
families and troubles, like their fathers and mothers before them.

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

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

"And which son is this?" I asked.

They laughed a hearty chorus.  Son!  Nay, grandson, just back from
Indian service and a soldier-trumpeter to the King.  His brother was
in the same regiment with him.  And so it ran, sons and daughters,
and grand sons and daughters, world-wanderers and empire-builders,
all of them, while the old folks stayed at home and worked at
building empire too.


"There dwells a wife by the Northern Gate,
And a wealthy wife is she;
She breeds a breed o' rovin' men
And casts them over sea.

"And some are drowned in deep water,
And some in sight of shore;
And word goes back to the weary wife,
And ever she sends more."


But the Sea Wife's child-bearing is about done.  The stock is
running out, and the planet is filling up.  The wives of her sons
may carry on the breed, but her work is past.  The erstwhile men of
England are now the men of Australia, of Africa, of America.
England has sent forth "the best she breeds" for so long, and has
destroyed those that remained so fiercely, that little remains for
her to do but to sit down through the long nights and gaze at
royalty on the wall.

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

It could not be otherwise.  The most complacent Britisher cannot
hope to draw off the life-blood, and underfeed, and keep it up
forever.  The average Mrs. Thomas Mugridge has been driven into the
city, and she is not breeding very much of anything save an anaemic
and sickly progeny which cannot find enough to eat.  The strength of
the English-speaking race to-day is not in the tight little island,
but in the New World overseas, where are the sons and daughters of
Mrs. Thomas Mugridge.  The Sea Wife by the Northern Gate has just
about done her work in the world, though she does not realize it.
She must sit down and rest her tired loins for a space; and if the
casual ward and the workhouse do not await her, it is because of the
sons and daughters she has reared up against the day of her
feebleness and decay.



CHAPTER XVI--PROPERTY VERSUS PERSON



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

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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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



CHAPTER XVII--INEFFICIENCY



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

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

"You can't blame them," was the answer.  "They're just like us, and
they've got to live.  Don't blame the man who offers to work cheaper
than you and gets your job."

"But 'ow about the wife an' kiddies?" his interlocutor demanded.

"There you are," came the answer.  "How about the wife and kiddies
of the man who works cheaper than you and gets your job?  Eh?  How
about his wife and kiddies?  He's more interested in them than in
yours, and he can't see them starve.  So he cuts the price of labour
and out you go.  But you mustn't blame him, poor devil.  He can't
help it.  Wages always come down when two men are after the same
job.  That's the fault of competition, not of the man who cuts the
price."

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

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

Without going further into the argument, this man on the Mile End
Waste pointed the moral that when two men were after the one job
wages were bound to fall.  Had he gone deeper into the matter, he
would have found that even the union, say twenty thousand strong,
could not hold up wages if twenty thousand idle men were trying to
displace the union men.  This is admirably instanced, just now, by
the return and disbandment of the soldiers from South Africa.  They
find themselves, by tens of thousands, in desperate straits in the
army of the unemployed.  There is a general decline in wages
throughout the land, which, giving rise to labour disputes and
strikes, is taken advantage of by the unemployed, who gladly pick up
the tools thrown down by the strikers.

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

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

As I say, it is an extravagance for a man to patronise a casual
ward.  And that they know it themselves is shown by the way these
men shun it till driven in by physical exhaustion.  Then why do they
do it?  Not because they are discouraged workers.  The very opposite
is true; they are discouraged vagabonds.  In the United States the
tramp is almost invariably a discouraged worker.  He finds tramping
a softer mode of life than working.  But this is not true in
England.  Here the powers that be do their utmost to discourage the
tramp and vagabond, and he is, in all truth, a mightily discouraged
creature.  He knows that two shillings a day, which is only fifty
cents, will buy him three fair meals, a bed at night, and leave him
a couple of pennies for pocket money.  He would rather work for
those two shillings than for the charity of the casual ward; for he
knows that he would not have to work so hard, and that he would not
be so abominably treated.  He does not do so, however, because there
are more men to do work than there is work for men to do.

When there are more men than there is work to be done, a sifting-out
process must obtain.  In every branch of industry the less efficient
are crowded out.  Being crowded out because of inefficiency, they
cannot go up, but must descend, and continue to descend, until they
reach their proper level, a place in the industrial fabric where
they are efficient.  It follows, therefore, and it is inexorable,
that the least efficient must descend to the very bottom, which is
the shambles wherein they perish miserably.

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

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

Here, then, we have the construction of the Abyss and the shambles.
Throughout the whole industrial fabric a constant elimination is
going on.  The inefficient are weeded out and flung downward.
Various things constitute inefficiency.  The engineer who is
irregular or irresponsible will sink down until he finds his place,
say as a casual labourer, an occupation irregular in its very nature
and in which there is little or no responsibility.  Those who are
slow and clumsy, who suffer from weakness of body or mind, or who
lack nervous, mental, and physical stamina, must sink down,
sometimes rapidly, sometimes step by step, to the bottom.  Accident,
by disabling an efficient worker, will make him inefficient, and
down he must go.  And the worker who becomes aged, with failing
energy and numbing brain, must begin the frightful descent which
knows no stopping-place short of the bottom and death.

In this last instance, the statistics of London tell a terrible
tale.  The population of London is one-seventh of the total
population of the United Kingdom, and in London, year in and year
out, one adult in every four dies on public charity, either in the
workhouse, the hospital, or the asylum.  When the fact that the
well-to-do do not end thus is taken into consideration, it becomes
manifest that it is the fate of at least one in every three adult
workers to die on public charity.

As an illustration of how a good worker may suddenly become
inefficient, and what then happens to him, I am tempted to give the
case of M'Garry, a man thirty-two years of age, and an inmate of the
workhouse.  The extracts are quoted from the annual report of the
trade union.


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

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

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


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

It must be understood that efficiency is not determined by the
workers themselves, but is determined by the demand for labour.  If
three men seek one position, the most efficient man will get it.
The other two, no matter how capable they may be, will none the less
be inefficients.  If Germany, Japan, and the United States should
capture the entire world market for iron, coal, and textiles, at
once the English workers would be thrown idle by hundreds of
thousands.  Some would emigrate, but the rest would rush their
labour into the remaining industries.  A general shaking up of the
workers from top to bottom would result; and when equilibrium had
been restored, the number of the inefficients at the bottom of the
Abyss would have been increased by hundreds of thousands.  On the
other hand, conditions remaining constant and all the workers
doubling their efficiency, there would still be as many
inefficients, though each inefficient were twice as capable as he
had been and more capable than many of the efficients had previously
been.

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



CHAPTER XVIII--WAGES



When I learned that in Lesser London there were 1,292,737 people who
received twenty-one shillings or less a week per family, I became
interested as to how the wages could best be spent in order to
maintain the physical efficiency of such families.  Families of six,
seven, eight or ten being beyond consideration, I have based the
following table upon a family of five--a father, mother, and three
children; while I have made twenty-one shillings equivalent to
$5.25, though actually, twenty-one shillings are equivalent to about
$5.11.


Rent       $1.50    or 6/0
Bread       1.00    " 4/0
Meat        O.87.5  " 3/6
Vegetables  O.62.5  " 2/6
Coals       0.25    " 1/0
Tea         0.18    " 0/9
Oil         0.16    " 0/8
Sugar       0.18    " 0/9
Milk        0.12    " 0/6
Soap        0.08    " 0/4
Butter      0.20    " 0/10
Firewood    0.08    " 0/4
Total      $5.25     21/2


An analysis of one item alone will show how little room there is for
waste.  Bread, $1:  for a family of five, for seven days, one
dollar's worth of bread will give each a daily ration of 2.8 cents;
and if they eat three meals a day, each may consume per meal 9.5
mills' worth of bread, a little less than one halfpennyworth.  Now
bread is the heaviest item.  They will get less of meat per mouth
each meal, and still less of vegetates; while the smaller items
become too microscopic for consideration.  On the other hand, these
food articles are all bought at small retail, the most expensive and
wasteful method of purchasing.

While the table given above will permit no extravagance, no
overloading of stomachs, it will be noticed that there is no
surplus.  The whole guinea is spent for food and rent.  There is no
pocket-money left over.  Does the man buy a glass of beer, the
family must eat that much less; and in so far as it eats less, just
that far will it impair its physical efficiency.  The members of
this family cannot ride in busses or trams, cannot write letters,
take outings, go to a "tu'penny gaff" for cheap vaudeville, join
social or benefit clubs, nor can they buy sweetmeats, tobacco,
books, or newspapers.

And further, should one child (and there are three) require a pair
of shoes, the family must strike meat for a week from its bill of
fare.  And since there are five pairs of feet requiring shoes, and
five heads requiring hats, and five bodies requiring clothes, and
since there are laws regulating indecency, the family must
constantly impair its physical efficiency in order to keep warm and
out of jail.  For notice, when rent, coals, oil, soap, and firewood
are extracted from the weekly income, there remains a daily
allowance for food of 4.5d. to each person; and that 4.5d. cannot be
lessened by buying clothes without impairing the physical
efficiency.

All of which is hard enough.  But the thing happens; the husband and
father breaks his leg or his neck.  No 4.5d. a day per mouth for
food is coming in; no halfpennyworth of bread per meal; and, at the
end of the week, no six shillings for rent.  So out they must go, to
the streets or the workhouse, or to a miserable den, somewhere, in
which the mother will desperately endeavour to hold the family
together on the ten shillings she may possibly be able to earn.

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

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

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


This leaves nothing for clothes, recreation, or sickness.  And yet
many of the girls are receiving, not eighteen shillings, but eleven
shillings, twelve shillings, and fourteen shillings per week.  They
must have clothes and recreation, and -


Man to Man so oft unjust,
Is always so to Woman.


At the Trades Union Congress now being held in London, the
Gasworkers' Union moved that instructions be given the Parliamentary
Committee to introduce a Bill to prohibit the employment of children
under fifteen years of age.  Mr. Shackleton, Member of Parliament
and a representative of the Northern Counties Weavers, opposed the
resolution on behalf of the textile workers, who, he said, could not
dispense with the earnings of their children and live on the scale
of wages which obtained.  The representatives of 514,000 workers
voted against the resolution, while the representatives of 535,000
workers voted in favour of it.  When 514,000 workers oppose a
resolution prohibiting child-labour under fifteen, it is evident
that a less-than-living wage is being paid to an immense number of
the adult workers of the country.

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

A case recently cropped up of men, in the employ of a wealthy
business house, receiving their board and six shillings per week for
six working days of sixteen hours each.  The sandwich men get
fourteenpence per day and find themselves.  The average weekly
earnings of the hawkers and costermongers are not more than ten to
twelve shillings.  The average of all common labourers, outside the
dockers, is less than sixteen shillings per week, while the dockers
average from eight to nine shillings.  These figures are taken from
a royal commission report and are authentic.

Conceive of an old woman, broken and dying, supporting herself and
four children, and paying three shillings per week rent, by making
match boxes at 2.25d. per gross.  Twelve dozen boxes for 2.25d.,
and, in addition, finding her own paste and thread!  She never knew
a clay off, either for sickness, rest, or recreation.  Each day and
every day, Sundays as well, she toiled fourteen hours.  Her day's
stint was seven gross, for which she received 1s. 3.75d.  In the
week of ninety-eight hours' work, she made 7066 match boxes, and
earned 4s. 10.25d., less per paste and thread.

Last year, Mr. Thomas Holmes, a police-court missionary of note,
after writing about the condition of the women workers, received the
following letter, dated April 18, 1901:-


Sir,--Pardon the liberty I am taking, but, having read what you said
about poor women working fourteen hours a day for ten shillings per
week, I beg to state my case.  I am a tie-maker, who, after working
all the week, cannot earn more than five shillings, and I have a
poor afflicted husband to keep who hasn't earned a penny for more
than ten years.


Imagine a woman, capable of writing such a clear, sensible,
grammatical letter, supporting her husband and self on five
shillings per week!  Mr. Holmes visited her.  He had to squeeze to
get into the room.  There lay her sick husband; there she worked all
day long; there she cooked, ate, washed, and slept; and there her
husband and she performed all the functions of living and dying.
There was no space for the missionary to sit down, save on the bed,
which was partially covered with ties and silk.  The sick man's
lungs were in the last stages of decay.  He coughed and expectorated
constantly, the woman ceasing from her work to assist him in his
paroxysms.  The silken fluff from the ties was not good for his
sickness; nor was his sickness good for the ties, and the handlers
and wearers of the ties yet to come.

Another case Mr. Holmes visited was that of a young girl, twelve
years of age, charged in the police court with stealing food.  He
found her the deputy mother of a boy of nine, a crippled boy of
seven, and a younger child.  Her mother was a widow and a blouse-
maker.  She paid five shillings a week rent.  Here are the last
items in her housekeeping account:  Tea. 0.5d.; sugar, 0.5d.; bread,
0.25d.; margarine, 1d.; oil, 1.5d.; and firewood, 1d.  Good
housewives of the soft and tender folk, imagine yourselves marketing
and keeping house on such a scale, setting a table for five, and
keeping an eye on your deputy mother of twelve to see that she did
not steal food for her little brothers and sisters, the while you
stitched, stitched, stitched at a nightmare line of blouses, which
stretched away into the gloom and down to the pauper's coffin a-yawn
for you.



CHAPTER XIX--THE GHETTO



Is it well that while we range with Science, glorying in the time,
City children soak and blacken soul and sense in city slime?
There among the gloomy alleys Progress halts on palsied feet;
Crime and hunger cast out maidens by the thousand on the street;

There the master scrimps his haggard seamstress of her daily bread;
There the single sordid attic holds the living and the dead;
There the smouldering fire of fever creeps across the rotted floor,
And the crowded couch of incest, in the warrens of the poor.


At one time the nations of Europe confined the undesirable Jews in
city ghettos.  But to-day the dominant economic class, by less
arbitrary but none the less rigorous methods, has confined the
undesirable yet necessary workers into ghettos of remarkable
meanness and vastness.  East London is such a ghetto, where the rich
and the powerful do not dwell, and the traveller cometh not, and
where two million workers swarm, procreate, and die.

It must not be supposed that all the workers of London are crowded
into the East End, but the tide is setting strongly in that
direction.  The poor quarters of the city proper are constantly
being destroyed, and the main stream of the unhoused is toward the
east.  In the last twelve years, one district, "London over the
Border," as it is called, which lies well beyond Aldgate,
Whitechapel, and Mile End, has increased 260,000, or over sixty per
cent.  The churches in this district, by the way, can seat but one
in every thirty-seven of the added population.

The City of Dreadful Monotony, the East End is often called,
especially by well-fed, optimistic sightseers, who look over the
surface of things and are merely shocked by the intolerable sameness
and meanness of it all.  If the East End is worthy of no worse title
than The City of Dreadful Monotony, and if working people are
unworthy of variety and beauty and surprise, it would not be such a
bad place in which to live.  But the East End does merit a worse
title.  It should be called The City of Degradation.

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

The application of the Golden Rule determines that East London is an
unfit place in which to live.  Where you would not have your own
babe live, and develop, and gather to itself knowledge of life and
the things of life, is not a fit place for the babes of other men to
live, and develop, and gather to themselves knowledge of life and
the things of life.  It is a simple thing, this Golden Rule, and all
that is required.  Political economy and the survival of the fittest
can go hang if they say otherwise.  What is not good enough for you
is not good enough for other men, and there's no more to be said.

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

Mr. Charles Booth, who engaged in a systematic work of years in
charting and classifying the toiling city population, estimates that
there are 1,800,000 people in London who are POOR and VERY POOR.  It
is of interest to mark what he terms poor.  By POOR he means
families which have a total weekly income of from eighteen to
twenty-one shillings.  The VERY POOR fall greatly below this
standard.

The workers, as a class, are being more and more segregated by their
economic masters; and this process, with its jamming and
overcrowding, tends not so much toward immorality as unmorality.
Here is an extract from a recent meeting of the London County
Council, terse and bald, but with a wealth of horror to be read
between the lines:-


Mr. Bruce asked the Chairman of the Public Health Committee whether
his attention had been called to a number of cases of serious
overcrowding in the East End.  In St. Georges-in-the-East a man and
his wife and their family of eight occupied one small room.  This
family consisted of five daughters, aged twenty, seventeen, eight,
four, and an infant; and three sons, aged fifteen, thirteen, and
twelve.  In Whitechapel a man and his wife and their three
daughters, aged sixteen, eight, and four, and two sons, aged ten and
twelve years, occupied a smaller room.  In Bethnal Green a man and
his wife, with four sons, aged twenty-three, twenty-one, nineteen,
and sixteen, and two daughters, aged fourteen and seven, were also
found in one room.  He asked whether it was not the duty of the
various local authorities to prevent such serious overcrowding.


But with 900,000 people actually living under illegal conditions,
the authorities have their hands full.  When the overcrowded folk
are ejected they stray off into some other hole; and, as they move
their belongings by night, on hand-barrows (one hand-barrow
accommodating the entire household goods and the sleeping children),
it is next to impossible to keep track of them.  If the Public
Health Act of 1891 were suddenly and completely enforced, 900,000
people would receive notice to clear out of their houses and go on
to the streets, and 500,000 rooms would have to be built before they
were all legally housed again.

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

In Devonshire Place, Lisson Grove, a short while back died an old
woman of seventy-five years of age.  At the inquest the coroner's
officer stated that "all he found in the room was a lot of old rags
covered with vermin.  He had got himself smothered with the vermin.
The room was in a shocking condition, and he had never seen anything
like it.  Everything was absolutely covered with vermin."

The doctor said:  "He found deceased lying across the fender on her
back.  She had one garment and her stockings on.  The body was quite
alive with vermin, and all the clothes in the room were absolutely
grey with insects.  Deceased was very badly nourished and was very
emaciated.  She had extensive sores on her legs, and her stockings
were adherent to those sores.  The sores were the result of vermin."

A man present at the inquest wrote:  "I had the evil fortune to see
the body of the unfortunate woman as it lay in the mortuary; and
even now the memory of that gruesome sight makes me shudder.  There
she lay in the mortuary shell, so starved and emaciated that she was
a mere bundle of skin and bones.  Her hair, which was matted with
filth, was simply a nest of vermin.  Over her bony chest leaped and
rolled hundreds, thousands, myriads of vermin!"

If it is not good for your mother and my mother so to die, then it
is not good for this woman, whosoever's mother she might be, so to
die.

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

It is notorious that here in the Ghetto the houses of the poor are
greater profit earners than the mansions of the rich.  Not only does
the poor worker have to live like a beast, but he pays
proportionately more for it than does the rich man for his spacious
comfort.  A class of house-sweaters has been made possible by the
competition of the poor for houses.  There are more people than
there is room, and numbers are in the workhouse because they cannot
find shelter elsewhere.  Not only are houses let, but they are
sublet, and sub-sublet down to the very rooms.

"A part of a room to let."  This notice was posted a short while ago
in a window not five minutes' walk from St. James's Hall.  The Rev.
Hugh Price Hughes is authority for the statement that beds are let
on the three-relay system--that is, three tenants to a bed, each
occupying it eight hours, so that it never grows cold; while the
floor space underneath the bed is likewise let on the three-relay
system.  Health officers are not at all unused to finding such cases
as the following:  in one room having a cubic capacity of 1000 feet,
three adult females in the bed, and two adult females under the bed;
and in one room of 1650 cubic feet, one adult male and two children
in the bed, and two adult females under the bed.

Here is a typical example of a room on the more respectable two-
relay system.  It is occupied in the daytime by a young woman
employed all night in a hotel.  At seven o'clock in the evening she
vacates the room, and a bricklayer's labourer comes in.  At seven in
the morning he vacates, and goes to his work, at which time she
returns from hers.

The Rev. W. N. Davies, rector of Spitalfields, took a census of some
of the alleys in his parish.  He says:-


In one alley there are ten houses--fifty-one rooms, nearly all about
8 feet by 9 feet--and 254 people.  In six instances only do 2 people
occupy one room; and in others the number varied from 3 to 9.  In
another court with six houses and twenty-two rooms were 84 people--
again 6, 7, 8, and 9 being the number living in one room, in several
instances.  In one house with eight rooms are 45 people--one room
containing 9 persons, one 8, two 7, and another 6.


This Ghetto crowding is not through inclination, but compulsion.
Nearly fifty per cent. of the workers pay from one-fourth to one-
half of their earnings for rent.  The average rent in the larger
part of the East End is from four to six shillings per week for one
room, while skilled mechanics, earning thirty-five shillings per
week, are forced to part with fifteen shillings of it for two or
three pokey little dens, in which they strive desperately to obtain
some semblance of home life.  And rents are going up all the time.
In one street in Stepney the increase in only two years has been
from thirteen to eighteen shillings; in another street from eleven
to sixteen shillings; and in another street, from eleven to fifteen
shillings; while in Whitechapel, two-room houses that recently
rented for ten shillings are now costing twenty-one shillings.
East, west, north, and south the rents are going up.  When land is
worth from 20,000 pounds to 30,000 pounds an acre, some one must pay
the landlord.

Mr. W. C. Steadman, in the House of Commons, in a speech concerning
his constituency in Stepney, related the following:-


This morning, not a hundred yards from where I am myself living, a
widow stopped me.  She has six children to support, and the rent of
her house was fourteen shillings per week.  She gets her living by
letting the house to lodgers and doing a day's washing or charring.
That woman, with tears in her eyes, told me that the landlord had
increased the rent from fourteen shillings to eighteen shillings.
What could the woman do?  There is no accommodation in Stepney.
Every place is taken up and overcrowded.


Class supremacy can rest only on class degradation; and when the
workers are segregated in the Ghetto, they cannot escape the
consequent degradation.  A short and stunted people is created--a
breed strikingly differentiated from their masters' breed, a
pavement folk, as it were lacking stamina and strength.  The men
become caricatures of what physical men ought to be, and their women
and children are pale and anaemic, with eyes ringed darkly, who
stoop and slouch, and are early twisted out of all shapeliness and
beauty.

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

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

A woman of the lower Ghetto classes is as much the slave of her
husband as is the Indian squaw.  And I, for one, were I a woman and
had but the two choices, should prefer being a squaw.  The men are
economically dependent on their masters, and the women are
economically dependent on the men.  The result is, the woman gets
the beating the man should give his master, and she can do nothing.
There are the kiddies, and he is the breadwinner, and she dare not
send him to jail and leave herself and children to starve.  Evidence
to convict can rarely be obtained when such cases come into the
courts; as a rule, the trampled wife and mother is weeping and
hysterically beseeching the magistrate to let her husband off for
the kiddies' sakes.

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

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


To me, at least, it would be enough to condemn modern society as
hardly an advance on slavery or serfdom, if the permanent condition
of industry were to be that which we behold, that ninety per cent.
of the actual producers of wealth have no home that they can call
their own beyond the end of the week; have no bit of soil, or so
much as a room that belongs to them; have nothing of value of any
kind, except as much old furniture as will go into a cart; have the
precarious chance of weekly wages, which barely suffice to keep them
in health; are housed, for the most part, in places that no man
thinks fit for his horse; are separated by so narrow a margin from
destitution that a month of bad trade, sickness, or unexpected loss
brings them face to face with hunger and pauperism . . . But below
this normal state of the average workman in town and country, there
is found the great band of destitute outcasts--the camp followers of
the army of industry--at least one-tenth the whole proletarian
population, whose normal condition is one of sickening wretchedness.
If this is to be the permanent arrangement of modern society,
civilization must be held to bring a curse on the great majority of
mankind.


Ninety per cent.!  The figures are appalling, yet Mr. Stopford
Brooke, after drawing a frightful London picture, finds himself
compelled to multiply it by half a million.  Here it is:-


I often used to meet, when I was curate at Kensington, families
drifting into London along the Hammersmith Road.  One day there came
along a labourer and his wife, his son and two daughters.  Their
family had lived for a long time on an estate in the country, and
managed, with the help of the common-land and their labour, to get
on.  But the time came when the common was encroached upon, and
their labour was not needed on the estate, and they were quietly
turned out of their cottage.  Where should they go?  Of course to
London, where work was thought to be plentiful.  They had a little
savings, and they thought they could get two decent rooms to live
in.  But the inexorable land question met them in London.  They
tried the decent courts for lodgings, and found that two rooms would
cost ten shillings a week.  Food was dear and bad, water was bad,
and in a short time their health suffered.  Work was hard to get,
and its wage was so low that they were soon in debt.  They became
more ill and more despairing with the poisonous surroundings, the
darkness, and the long hours of work; and they were driven forth to
seek a cheaper lodging.  They found it in a court I knew well--a
hotbed of crime and nameless horrors.  In this they got a single
room at a cruel rent, and work was more difficult for them to get
now, as they came from a place of such bad repute, and they fell
into the hands of those who sweat the last drop out of man and woman
and child, for wages which are the food only of despair.  And the
darkness and the dirt, the bad food and the sickness, and the want
of water was worse than before; and the crowd and the companionship
of the court robbed them of the last shreds of self-respect.  The
drink demon seized upon them.  Of course there was a public-house at
both ends of the court.  There they fled, one and all, for shelter,
and warmth, and society, and forgetfulness.  And they came out in
deeper debt, with inflamed senses and burning brains, and an
unsatisfied craving for drink they would do anything to satiate.
And in a few months the father was in prison, the wife dying, the
son a criminal, and the daughters on the street.  MULTIPLY THIS BY
HALF A MILLION, AND YOU WILL BE BENEATH THE TRUTH.


No more dreary spectacle can be found on this earth than the whole
of the "awful East," with its Whitechapel, Hoxton, Spitalfields,
Bethnal Green, and Wapping to the East India Docks.  The colour of
life is grey and drab.  Everything is helpless, hopeless,
unrelieved, and dirty.  Bath tubs are a thing totally unknown, as
mythical as the ambrosia of the gods.  The people themselves are
dirty, while any attempt at cleanliness becomes howling farce, when
it is not pitiful and tragic.  Strange, vagrant odours come drifting
along the greasy wind, and the rain, when it falls, is more like
grease than water from heaven.  The very cobblestones are scummed
with grease.

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

It used to be the proud boast that every Englishman's home was his
castle.  But to-day it is an anachronism.  The Ghetto folk have no
homes.  They do not know the significance and the sacredness of home
life.  Even the municipal dwellings, where live the better-class
workers, are overcrowded barracks.  They have no home life.  The
very language proves it.  The father returning from work asks his
child in the street where her mother is; and back the answer comes,
"In the buildings."

A new race has sprung up, a street people.  They pass their lives at
work and in the streets.  They have dens and lairs into which to
crawl for sleeping purposes, and that is all.  One cannot travesty
the word by calling such dens and lairs "homes."  The traditional
silent and reserved Englishman has passed away.  The pavement folk
are noisy, voluble, high-strung, excitable--when they are yet young.
As they grow older they become steeped and stupefied in beer.  When
they have nothing else to do, they ruminate as a cow ruminates.
They are to be met with everywhere, standing on curbs and corners,
and staring into vacancy.  Watch one of them.  He will stand there,
motionless, for hours, and when you go away you will leave him still
staring into vacancy.  It is most absorbing.  He has no money for
beer, and his lair is only for sleeping purposes, so what else
remains for him to do?  He has already solved the mysteries of
girl's love, and wife's love, and child's love, and found them
delusions and shams, vain and fleeting as dew-drops, quick-vanishing
before the ferocious facts of life.

As I say, the young are high-strung, nervous, excitable; the middle-
aged are empty-headed, stolid, and stupid.  It is absurd to think
for an instant that they can compete with the workers of the New
World.  Brutalised, degraded, and dull, the Ghetto folk will be
unable to render efficient service to England in the world struggle
for industrial supremacy which economists declare has already begun.
Neither as workers nor as soldiers can they come up to the mark when
England, in her need, calls upon them, her forgotten ones; and if
England be flung out of the world's industrial orbit, they will
perish like flies at the end of summer.  Or, with England critically
situated, and with them made desperate as wild beasts are made
desperate, they may become a menace and go "swelling" down to the
West End to return the "slumming" the West End has done in the East.
In which case, before rapid-fire guns and the modern machinery of
warfare, they will perish the more swiftly and easily.



CHAPTER XX--COFFEE-HOUSES AND DOSS-HOUSES



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

But here, on this side of the world, alas and alack, the very name
is a misnomer.  Coffee-house:  a place where people drink coffee.
Not at all.  You cannot obtain coffee in such a place for love or
money.  True, you may call for coffee, and you will have brought you
something in a cup purporting to be coffee, and you will taste it
and be disillusioned, for coffee it certainly is not.

And what is true of the coffee is true of the coffee-house.
Working-men, in the main, frequent these places, and greasy, dirty
places they are, without one thing about them to cherish decency in
a man or put self-respect into him.  Table-cloths and napkins are
unknown.  A man eats in the midst of the debris left by his
predecessor, and dribbles his own scraps about him and on the floor.
In rush times, in such places, I have positively waded through the
muck and mess that covered the floor, and I have managed to eat
because I was abominably hungry and capable of eating anything.

This seems to be the normal condition of the working-man, from the
zest with which he addresses himself to the board.  Eating is a
necessity, and there are no frills about it.  He brings in with him
a primitive voraciousness, and, I am confident, carries away with
him a fairly healthy appetite.  When you see such a man, on his way
to work in the morning, order a pint of tea, which is no more tea
than it is ambrosia, pull a hunk of dry bread from his pocket, and
wash the one down with the other, depend upon it, that man has not
the right sort of stuff in his belly, nor enough of the wrong sort
of stuff, to fit him for big day's work.  And further, depend upon
it, he and a thousand of his kind will not turn out the quantity or
quality of work that a thousand men will who have eaten heartily of
meat and potatoes, and drunk coffee that is coffee.

As a vagrant in the "Hobo" of a California jail, I have been served
better food and drink than the London workman receives in his
coffee-houses; while as an American labourer I have eaten a
breakfast for twelvepence such as the British labourer would not
dream of eating.  Of course, he will pay only three or four pence
for his; which is, however, as much as I paid, for I would be
earning six shillings to his two or two and a half.  On the other
hand, though, and in return, I would turn out an amount of work in
the course of the day that would put to shame the amount he turned
out.  So there are two sides to it.  The man with the high standard
of living will always do more work and better than the man with the
low standard of living.

There is a comparison which sailormen make between the English and
American merchant services.  In an English ship, they say, it is
poor grub, poor pay, and easy work; in an American ship, good grub,
good pay, and hard work.  And this is applicable to the working
populations of both countries.  The ocean greyhounds have to pay for
speed and steam, and so does the workman.  But if the workman is not
able to pay for it, he will not have the speed and steam, that is
all.  The proof of it is when the English workman comes to America.
He will lay more bricks in New York than he will in London, still
more bricks in St. Louis, and still more bricks when he gets to San
Francisco. {3}  His standard of living has been rising all the time.

Early in the morning, along the streets frequented by workmen on the
way to work, many women sit on the side-walk with sacks of bread
beside them.  No end of workmen purchase these, and eat them as they
walk along.  They do not even wash the dry bread down with the tea
to be obtained for a penny in the coffee-houses.  It is
incontestable that a man is not fit to begin his day's work on a
meal like that; and it is equally incontestable that the loss will
fall upon his employer and upon the nation.  For some time, now,
statesmen have been crying, "Wake up, England!"  It would show more
hard-headed common sense if they changed the tune to "Feed up,
England!"

Not only is the worker poorly fed, but he is filthily fed.  I have
stood outside a butcher-shop and watched a horde of speculative
housewives turning over the trimmings and scraps and shreds of beef
and mutton--dog-meat in the States.  I would not vouch for the clean
fingers of these housewives, no more than I would vouch for the
cleanliness of the single rooms in which many of them and their
families lived; yet they raked, and pawed, and scraped the mess
about in their anxiety to get the worth of their coppers.  I kept my
eye on one particularly offensive-looking bit of meat, and followed
it through the clutches of over twenty women, till it fell to the
lot of a timid-appearing little woman whom the butcher bluffed into
taking it.  All day long this heap of scraps was added to and taken
away from, the dust and dirt of the street falling upon it, flies
settling on it, and the dirty fingers turning it over and over.

The costers wheel loads of specked and decaying fruit around in the
barrows all day, and very often store it in their one living and
sleeping room for the night.  There it is exposed to the sickness
and disease, the effluvia and vile exhalations of overcrowded and
rotten life, and next day it is carted about again to be sold.

The poor worker of the East End never knows what it is to eat good,
wholesome meat or fruit--in fact, he rarely eats meat or fruit at
all; while the skilled workman has nothing to boast of in the way of
what he eats.  Judging from the coffee-houses, which is a fair
criterion, they never know in all their lives what tea, coffee, or
cocoa tastes like.  The slops and water-witcheries of the coffee-
houses, varying only in sloppiness and witchery, never even
approximate or suggest what you and I are accustomed to drink as tea
and coffee.

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

"Cawn yer let me 'ave somethin' for this, daughter?  Anythin', Hi
don't mind.  Hi 'aven't 'ad a bite the blessed dy, an' Hi'm that
fynt . . . "

She was an old woman, clad in decent black rags, and in her hand she
held a penny.  The one she had addressed as "daughter" was a
careworn woman of forty, proprietress and waitress of the house.

I waited, possibly as anxiously as the old woman, to see how the
appeal would be received.  It was four in the afternoon, and she
looked faint and sick.  The woman hesitated an instant, then brought
a large plate of "stewed lamb and young peas."  I was eating a plate
of it myself, and it is my judgment that the lamb was mutton and
that the peas might have been younger without being youthful.
However, the point is, the dish was sold at sixpence, and the
proprietress gave it for a penny, demonstrating anew the old truth
that the poor are the most charitable.

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

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

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

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

"Blimey, I'd like to do something for the old girl, that I would,
but this is the first I've 'ad to-dy," the young fellow alongside
volunteered to me.  "An' I only 'ave this because I 'appened to make
an odd shilling washin' out, Lord lumme! I don't know 'ow many
pots."

"No work at my own tryde for six weeks," he said further, in reply
to my questions; "nothin' but odd jobs a blessed long wy between."


One meets with all sorts of adventures in coffee-house, and I shall
not soon forget a Cockney Amazon in a place near Trafalgar Square,
to whom I tendered a sovereign when paying my score.  (By the way,
one is supposed to pay before he begins to eat, and if he be poorly
dressed he is compelled to pay before he eats).

The girl bit the gold piece between her teeth, rang it on the
counter, and then looked me and my rags witheringly up and down.

"Where'd you find it?" she at length demanded.

"Some mug left it on the table when he went out, eh, don't you
think?" I retorted.

"Wot's yer gyme?" she queried, looking me calmly in the eyes.

"I makes 'em," quoth I.

She sniffed superciliously and gave me the change in small silver,
and I had my revenge by biting and ringing every piece of it.

"I'll give you a ha'penny for another lump of sugar in the tea," I
said.

"I'll see you in 'ell first," came the retort courteous.  Also, she
amplified the retort courteous in divers vivid and unprintable ways.

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

While 300,000 people of London live in one-room tenements, and
900,000 are illegally and viciously housed, 38,000 more are
registered as living in common lodging-houses--known in the
vernacular as "doss-houses."  There are many kinds of doss-houses,
but in one thing they are all alike, from the filthy little ones to
the monster big ones paying five per cent. and blatantly lauded by
smug middle-class men who know but one thing about them, and that
one thing is their uninhabitableness.  By this I do not mean that
the roofs leak or the walls are draughty; but what I do mean is that
life in them is degrading and unwholesome.

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

This must not be considered a sweeping condemnation of the big
private and municipal lodging-houses and working-men's homes.  Far
from it.  They have remedied many of the atrocities attendant upon
the irresponsible small doss-houses, and they give the workman more
for his money than he ever received before; but that does not make
them as habitable or wholesome as the dwelling-place of a man should
be who does his work in the world.

The little private doss-houses, as a rule, are unmitigated horrors.
I have slept in them, and I know; but let me pass them by and
confine myself to the bigger and better ones.  Not far from
Middlesex Street, Whitechapel, I entered such a house, a place
inhabited almost entirely by working men.  The entrance was by way
of a flight of steps descending from the side-walk to what was
properly the cellar of the building.  Here were two large and
gloomily lighted rooms, in which men cooked and ate.  I had intended
to do some cooking myself, but the smell of the place stole away my
appetite, or, rather, wrested it from me; so I contented myself with
watching other men cook and eat.

One workman, home from work, sat down opposite me at the rough
wooden table, and began his meal.  A handful of salt on the not
over-clean table constituted his butter.  Into it he dipped his
bread, mouthful by mouthful, and washed it down with tea from a big
mug.  A piece of fish completed his bill of fare.  He ate silently,
looking neither to right nor left nor across at me.  Here and there,
at the various tables, other men were eating, just as silently.  In
the whole room there was hardly a note of conversation.  A feeling
of gloom pervaded the ill-lighted place.  Many of them sat and
brooded over the crumbs of their repast, and made me wonder, as
Childe Roland wondered, what evil they had done that they should be
punished so.

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

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

But no more than the two cellar rooms did this room convey the
remotest suggestion of home.  Certainly there could be nothing home-
like about it to you and me, who know what home really is.  On the
walls were the most preposterous and insulting notices regulating
the conduct of the guests, and at ten o'clock the lights were put
out, and nothing remained but bed.  This was gained by descending
again to the cellar, by surrendering the brass check to a burly
doorkeeper, and by climbing a long flight of stairs into the upper
regions.  I went to the top of the building and down again, passing
several floors filled with sleeping men.  The "cabins" were the best
accommodation, each cabin allowing space for a tiny bed and room
alongside of it in which to undress.  The bedding was clean, and
with neither it nor the bed do I find any fault.  But there was no
privacy about it, no being alone.

To get an adequate idea of a floor filled with cabins, you have
merely to magnify a layer of the pasteboard pigeon-holes of an egg-
crate till each pigeon-hole is seven feet in height and otherwise
properly dimensioned, then place the magnified layer on the floor of
a large, barnlike room, and there you have it.  There are no
ceilings to the pigeon-holes, the walls are thin, and the snores
from all the sleepers and every move and turn of your nearer
neighbours come plainly to your ears.  And this cabin is yours only
for a little while.  In the morning out you go.  You cannot put your
trunk in it, or come and go when you like, or lock the door behind
you, or anything of the sort.  In fact, there is no door at all,
only a doorway.  If you care to remain a guest in this poor man's
hotel, you must put up with all this, and with prison regulations
which impress upon you constantly that you are nobody, with little
soul of your own and less to say about it.

Now I contend that the least a man who does his day's work should
have is a room to himself, where he can lock the door and be safe in
his possessions; where he can sit down and read by a window or look
out; where he can come and go whenever he wishes; where he can
accumulate a few personal belongings other than those he carries
about with him on his back and in his pockets; where he can hang up
pictures of his mother, sister, sweet-heart, ballet dancers, or
bulldogs, as his heart listeth--in short, one place of his own on
the earth of which he can say:  "This is mine, my castle; the world
stops at the threshold; here am I lord and master."  He will be a
better citizen, this man; and he will do a better day's work.

I stood on one floor of the poor man's hotel and listened.  I went
from bed to bed and looked at the sleepers.  They were young men,
from twenty to forty, most of them.  Old men cannot afford the
working-man's home.  They go to the workhouse.  But I looked at the
young men, scores of them, and they were not bad-looking fellows.
Their faces were made for women's kisses, their necks for women's
arms.  They were lovable, as men are lovable.  They were capable of
love.  A woman's touch redeems and softens, and they needed such
redemption and softening instead of each day growing harsh and
harsher.  And I wondered where these women were, and heard a
"harlot's ginny laugh."  Leman Street, Waterloo Road, Piccadilly,
The Strand, answered me, and I knew where they were.



CHAPTER XXI--THE PRECARIOUSNESS OF LIFE



I was talking with a very vindictive man.  In his opinion, his wife
had wronged him and the law had wronged him.  The merits and morals
of the case are immaterial.  The meat of the matter is that she had
obtained a separation, and he was compelled to pay ten shillings
each week for the support of her and the five children.  "But look
you," said he to me, "wot'll 'appen to 'er if I don't py up the ten
shillings?  S'posin', now, just s'posin' a accident 'appens to me,
so I cawn't work.  S'posin' I get a rupture, or the rheumatics, or
the cholera.  Wot's she goin' to do, eh?  Wot's she goin' to do?"

He shook his head sadly.  "No 'ope for 'er.  The best she cawn do is
the work'ouse, an' that's 'ell.  An' if she don't go to the
work'ouse, it'll be a worse 'ell.  Come along 'ith me an' I'll show
you women sleepin' in a passage, a dozen of 'em.  An' I'll show you
worse, wot she'll come to if anythin' 'appens to me and the ten
shillings."

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

The figures are appalling:  1,800,000 people in London live on the
poverty line and below it, and 1,000,000 live with one week's wages
between them and pauperism.  In all England and Wales, eighteen per
cent. of the whole population are driven to the parish for relief,
and in London, according to the statistics of the London County
Council, twenty-one per cent. of the whole population are driven to
the parish for relief.  Between being driven to the parish for
relief and being an out-and-out pauper there is a great difference,
yet London supports 123,000 paupers, quite a city of folk in
themselves.  One in every four in London dies on public charity,
while 939 out of every 1000 in the United Kingdom die in poverty;
8,000,000 simply struggle on the ragged edge of starvation, and
20,000,000 more are not comfortable in the simple and clean sense of
the word.

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

In 1886, and up to 1893, the percentage of pauperism to population
was less in London than in all England; but since 1893, and for
every succeeding year, the percentage of pauperism to population has
been greater in London than in all England.  Yet, from the
Registrar-General's Report for 1886, the following figures are
taken:-


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


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


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

These figures serve somewhat to indicate the proximity of the
average worker to pauperism.  Various things make pauperism.  An
advertisement, for instance, such as this, appearing in yesterday
morning's paper:-

"Clerk wanted, with knowledge of shorthand, typewriting, and
invoicing:  wages ten shillings ($2.50) a week.  Apply by letter,"
&c.

And in to-day's paper I read of a clerk, thirty-five years of age
and an inmate of a London workhouse, brought before a magistrate for
non-performance of task.  He claimed that he had done his various
tasks since he had been an inmate; but when the master set him to
breaking stones, his hands blistered, and he could not finish the
task.  He had never been used to an implement heavier than a pen, he
said.  The magistrate sentenced him and his blistered hands to seven
days' hard labour.

Old age, of course, makes pauperism.  And then there is the
accident, the thing happening, the death or disablement of the
husband, father, and bread-winner.  Here is a man, with a wife and
three children, living on the ticklish security of twenty shillings
per week--and there are hundreds of thousands of such families in
London.  Perforce, to even half exist, they must live up to the last
penny of it, so that a week's wages (one pound) is all that stands
between this family and pauperism or starvation.  The thing happens,
the father is struck down, and what then?  A mother with three
children can do little or nothing.  Either she must hand her
children over to society as juvenile paupers, in order to be free to
do something adequate for herself, or she must go to the sweat-shops
for work which she can perform in the vile den possible to her
reduced income.  But with the sweat-shops, married women who eke out
their husband's earnings, and single women who have but themselves
miserably to support, determine the scale of wages.  And this scale
of wages, so determined, is so low that the mother and her three
children can live only in positive beastliness and semi-starvation,
till decay and death end their suffering.

To show that this mother, with her three children to support, cannot
compete in the sweating industries, I instance from the current
newspapers the two following cases:-

A father indignantly writes that his daughter and a girl companion
receive 8.5d. per gross for making boxes.  They made each day four
gross.  Their expenses were 8d. for car fare, 2d. for stamps, 2.5d.
for glue, and 1d. for string, so that all they earned between them
was 1s. 9d., or a daily wage each of 10.5d.

In the second ewe, before the Luton Guardians a few days ago, an old
woman of seventy-two appeared, asking for relief.  "She was a straw-
hat maker, but had been compelled to give up the work owing to the
price she obtained for them--namely, 2.25d. each.  For that price
she had to provide plait trimmings and make and finish the hats."

Yet this mother and her three children we are considering have done
no wrong that they should be so punished.  They have not sinned.
The thing happened, that is all; the husband, father and bread-
winner, was struck down.  There is no guarding against it.  It is
fortuitous.  A family stands so many chances of escaping the bottom
of the Abyss, and so many chances of falling plump down to it.  The
chance is reducible to cold, pitiless figures, and a few of these
figures will not be out of place.

Sir A. Forwood calculates that -


1 of every 1400 workmen is killed annually.
1 of every 2500 workmen is totally disabled.
1 of every 300 workmen is permanently partially disabled.
1 of every 8 workmen is temporarily disabled 3 or 4 weeks.


But these are only the accidents of industry.  The high mortality of
the people who live in the Ghetto plays a terrible part.  The
average age at death among the people of the West End is fifty-five
years; the average age at death among the people of the East End is
thirty years.  That is to say, the person in the West End has twice
the chance for life that the person has in the East End.  Talk of
war!  The mortality in South Africa and the Philippines fades away
to insignificance.  Here, in the heart of peace, is where the blood
is being shed; and here not even the civilised rules of warfare
obtain, for the women and children and babes in the arms are killed
just as ferociously as the men are killed.  War!  In England, every
year, 500,000 men, women, and children, engaged in the various
industries, are killed and disabled, or are injured to disablement
by disease.

In the West End eighteen per cent. of the children die before five
years of age; in the East End fifty-five per cent. of the children
die before five years of age.  And there are streets in London where
out of every one hundred children born in a year, fifty die during
the next year; and of the fifty that remain, twenty-five die before
they are five years old.  Slaughter!  Herod did not do quite so
badly.

That industry causes greater havoc with human life than battle does
no better substantiation can be given than the following extract
from a recent report of the Liverpool Medical Officer, which is not
applicable to Liverpool alone:-


In many instances little if any sunlight could get to the courts,
and the atmosphere within the dwellings was always foul, owing
largely to the saturated condition of the walls and ceilings, which
for so many years had absorbed the exhalations of the occupants into
their porous material.  Singular testimony to the absence of
sunlight in these courts was furnished by the action of the Parks
and Gardens Committee, who desired to brighten the homes of the
poorest class by gifts of growing flowers and window-boxes; but
these gifts could not be made in courts such as these, AS FLOWERS
AND PLANTS WERE SUSCEPTIBLE TO THE UNWHOLESOME SURROUNDINGS, AND
WOULD NOT LIVE.

Mr. George Haw has compiled the following table on the three St.
George's parishes (London parishes):-


                   Percentage of
                   Population      Death-rate
                   Overcrowded      per 1000
St. George's West  10                 13.2
St. George's South 35                 23.7
St. George's East  40                 26.4


Then there are the "dangerous trades," in which countless workers
are employed.  Their hold on life is indeed precarious--far, far
more precarious than the hold of the twentieth-century soldier on
life.  In the linen trade, in the preparation of the flax, wet feet
and wet clothes cause an unusual amount of bronchitis, pneumonia,
and severe rheumatism; while in the carding and spinning departments
the fine dust produces lung disease in the majority of cases, and
the woman who starts carding at seventeen or eighteen begins to
break up and go to pieces at thirty.  The chemical labourers, picked
from the strongest and most splendidly-built men to be found, live,
on an average, less than forty-eight years.

Says Dr. Arlidge, of the potter's trade:  "Potter's dust does not
kill suddenly, but settles, year after year, a little more firmly
into the lungs, until at length a case of plaster is formed.
Breathing becomes more and more difficult and depressed, and finally
ceases."

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


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


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


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

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

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

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


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

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

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

To the young working-man or working-woman, or married couple, there
is no assurance of happy or healthy middle life, nor of solvent old
age.  Work as they will, they cannot make their future secure.  It
is all a matter of chance.  Everything depends upon the thing
happening, the thing with which they have nothing to do.  Precaution
cannot fend it off, nor can wiles evade it.  If they remain on the
industrial battlefield they must face it and take their chance
against heavy odds.  Of course, if they are favourably made and are
not tied by kinship duties, they may run away from the industrial
battlefield.  In which event the safest thing the man can do is to
join the army; and for the woman, possibly, to become a Red Cross
nurse or go into a nunnery.  In either case they must forego home
and children and all that makes life worth living and old age other
than a nightmare.



CHAPTER XXII--SUICIDE



With life so precarious, and opportunity for the happiness of life
so remote, it is inevitable that life shall be cheap and suicide
common.  So common is it, that one cannot pick up a daily paper
without running across it; while an attempt-at-suicide case in a
police court excites no more interest than an ordinary "drunk," and
is handled with the same rapidity and unconcern.

I remember such a case in the Thames Police Court.  I pride myself
that I have good eyes and ears, and a fair working knowledge of men
and things; but I confess, as I stood in that court-room, that I was
half bewildered by the amazing despatch with which drunks,
disorderlies, vagrants, brawlers, wife-beaters, thieves, fences,
gamblers, and women of the street went through the machine of
justice.  The dock stood in the centre of the court (where the light
is best), and into it and out again stepped men, women, and
children, in a stream as steady as the stream of sentences which
fell from the magistrate's lips.

I was still pondering over a consumptive "fence" who had pleaded
inability to work and necessity for supporting wife and children,
and who had received a year at hard labour, when a young boy of
about twenty appeared in the dock.  "Alfred Freeman," I caught his
name, but failed to catch the charge.  A stout and motherly-looking
woman bobbed up in the witness-box and began her testimony.  Wife of
the Britannia lock-keeper, I learned she was.  Time, night; a
splash; she ran to the lock and found the prisoner in the water.

I flashed my gaze from her to him.  So that was the charge, self-
murder.  He stood there dazed and unheeding, his bonny brown hair
rumpled down his forehead, his face haggard and careworn and boyish
still.

"Yes, sir," the lock-keeper's wife was saying.  "As fast as I pulled
to get 'im out, 'e crawled back.  Then I called for 'elp, and some
workmen 'appened along, and we got 'im out and turned 'im over to
the constable."

The magistrate complimented the woman on her muscular powers, and
the court-room laughed; but all I could see was a boy on the
threshold of life, passionately crawling to muddy death, and there
was no laughter in it.

A man was now in the witness-box, testifying to the boy's good
character and giving extenuating evidence.  He was the boy's
foreman, or had been.  Alfred was a good boy, but he had had lots of
trouble at home, money matters.  And then his mother was sick.  He
was given to worrying, and he worried over it till he laid himself
out and wasn't fit for work.  He (the foreman), for the sake of his
own reputation, the boy's work being bad, had been forced to ask him
to resign.

"Anything to say?" the magistrate demanded abruptly.

The boy in the dock mumbled something indistinctly.  He was still
dazed.

"What does he say, constable?" the magistrate asked impatiently.

The stalwart man in blue bent his ear to the prisoner's lips, and
then replied loudly, "He says he's very sorry, your Worship."

"Remanded," said his Worship; and the next case was under way, the
first witness already engaged in taking the oath.  The boy, dazed
and unheeding, passed out with the jailer.  That was all, five
minutes from start to finish; and two hulking brutes in the dock
were trying strenuously to shift the responsibility of the
possession of a stolen fishing-pole, worth probably ten cents.

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

Poverty, misery, and fear of the workhouse, are the principal causes
of suicide among the working classes.  "I'll drown myself before I
go into the workhouse," said Ellen Hughes Hunt, aged fifty-two.
Last Wednesday they held an inquest on her body at Shoreditch.  Her
husband came from the Islington Workhouse to testify.  He had been a
cheesemonger, but failure in business and poverty had driven him
into the workhouse, whither his wife had refused to accompany him.

She was last seen at one in the morning.  Three hours later her hat
and jacket were found on the towing path by the Regent's Canal, and
later her body was fished from the water.  VERDICT:  SUICIDE DURING
TEMPORARY INSANITY.

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

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

Man no longer follows instinct with the old natural fidelity.  He
has developed into a reasoning creature, and can intellectually
cling to life or discard life just as life happens to promise great
pleasure or pain.  I dare to assert that Ellen Hughes Hunt,
defrauded and bilked of all the joys of life which fifty-two years'
service in the world has earned, with nothing but the horrors of the
workhouse before her, was very rational and level-headed when she
elected to jump into the canal.  And I dare to assert, further, that
the jury had done a wiser thing to bring in a verdict charging
society with temporary insanity for allowing Ellen Hughes Hunt to be
defrauded and bilked of all the joys of life which fifty-two years'
service in the world had earned.

Temporary insanity!  Oh, these cursed phrases, these lies of
language, under which people with meat in their bellies and whole
shirts on their backs shelter themselves, and evade the
responsibility of their brothers and sisters, empty of belly and
without whole shirts on their backs.

From one issue of the Observer, an East End paper, I quote the
following commonplace events:-


A ship's fireman, named Johnny King, was charged with attempting to
commit suicide.  On Wednesday defendant went to Bow Police Station
and stated that he had swallowed a quantity of phosphor paste, as he
was hard up and unable to obtain work.  King was taken inside and an
emetic administered, when he vomited up a quantity of the poison.
Defendant now said he was very sorry.  Although he had sixteen
years' good character, he was unable to obtain work of any kind.
Mr. Dickinson had defendant put back for the court missionary to see
him.

Timothy Warner, thirty-two, was remanded for a similar offence.  He
jumped off Limehouse Pier, and when rescued, said, "I intended to do
it."

A decent-looking young woman, named Ellen Gray, was remanded on a
charge of attempting to commit suicide.  About half-past eight on
Sunday morning Constable 834 K found defendant lying in a doorway in
Benworth Street, and she was in a very drowsy condition.  She was
holding an empty bottle in one hand, and stated that some two or
three hours previously she had swallowed a quantity of laudanum.  As
she was evidently very ill, the divisional surgeon was sent for, and
having administered some coffee, ordered that she was to be kept
awake.  When defendant was charged, she stated that the reason why
she attempted to take her life was she had neither home nor friends.


I do not say that all people who commit suicide are sane, no more
than I say that all people who do not commit suicide are sane.
Insecurity of food and shelter, by the way, is a great cause of
insanity among the living.  Costermongers, hawkers, and pedlars, a
class of workers who live from hand to mouth more than those of any
other class, form the highest percentage of those in the lunatic
asylums.  Among the males each year, 26.9 per 10,000 go insane, and
among the women, 36.9.  On the other hand, of soldiers, who are at
least sure of food and shelter, 13 per 10,000 go insane; and of
farmers and graziers, only 5.1.  So a coster is twice as likely to
lose his reason as a soldier, and five times as likely as a farmer.

Misfortune and misery are very potent in turning people's heads, and
drive one person to the lunatic asylum, and another to the morgue or
the gallows.  When the thing happens, and the father and husband,
for all of his love for wife and children and his willingness to
work, can get no work to do, it is a simple matter for his reason to
totter and the light within his brain go out.  And it is especially
simple when it is taken into consideration that his body is ravaged
by innutrition and disease, in addition to his soul being torn by
the sight of his suffering wife and little ones.

"He is a good-looking man, with a mass of black hair, dark,
expressive eyes, delicately chiselled nose and chin, and wavy, fair
moustache."  This is the reporter's description of Frank Cavilla as
he stood in court, this dreary month of September, "dressed in a
much worn grey suit, and wearing no collar."

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

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

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

This occurred eighteen months ago.  For eighteen months he fought
the big fight.  He got rooms in a little house in Batavia Road, but
could not make both ends meet.  Steady work could not be obtained.
He struggled manfully at casual employment of all sorts, his wife
and four children starving before his eyes.  He starved himself, and
grew weak, and fell ill.  This was three months ago, and then there
was absolutely no food at all.  They made no complaint, spoke no
word; but poor folk know.  The housewives of Batavia Road sent them
food, but so respectable were the Cavillas that the food was sent
anonymously, mysteriously, so as not to hurt their pride.

The thing had happened.  He had fought, and starved, and suffered
for eighteen months.  He got up one September morning, early.  He
opened his pocket-knife.  He cut the throat of his wife, Hannah
Cavilla, aged thirty-three.  He cut the throat of his first-born,
Frank, aged twelve.  He cut the throat of his son, Walter, aged
eight.  He cut the throat of his daughter, Nellie, aged four.  He
cut the throat of his youngest-born, Ernest, aged sixteen months.
Then he watched beside the dead all day until the evening, when the
police came, and he told them to put a penny in the slot of the gas-
meter in order that they might have light to see.

Frank Cavilla stood in court, dressed in a much worn grey suit, and
wearing no collar.  He was a good-looking man, with a mass of black
hair, dark, expressive eyes, delicately chiselled nose and chin, and
wavy, fair moustache.



CHAPTER XXIII--THE CHILDREN



"Where home is a hovel, and dull we grovel,
Forgetting the world is fair."


There is one beautiful sight in the East End, and only one, and it
is the children dancing in the street when the organ-grinder goes
his round.  It is fascinating to watch them, the new-born, the next
generation, swaying and stepping, with pretty little mimicries and
graceful inventions all their own, with muscles that move swiftly
and easily, and bodies that leap airily, weaving rhythms never
taught in dancing school.

I have talked with these children, here, there, and everywhere, and
they struck me as being bright as other children, and in many ways
even brighter.  They have most active little imaginations.  Their
capacity for projecting themselves into the realm of romance and
fantasy is remarkable.  A joyous life is romping in their blood.
They delight in music, and motion, and colour, and very often they
betray a startling beauty of face and form under their filth and
rags.

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

The children of the Ghetto possess all the qualities which make for
noble manhood and womanhood; but the Ghetto itself, like an
infuriated tigress turning on its young, turns upon and destroys all
these qualities, blots out the light and laughter, and moulds those
it does not kill into sodden and forlorn creatures, uncouth,
degraded, and wretched below the beasts of the field.

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

"Any one who is acquainted with the state of the population of all
great industrial centres, whether in this or other countries, is
aware that amidst a large and increasing body of that population
there reigns supreme . . . that condition which the French call la
misere, a word for which I do not think there is any exact English
equivalent.  It is a condition in which the food, warmth, and
clothing which are necessary for the mere maintenance of the
functions of the body in their normal state cannot be obtained; in
which men, women, and children are forced to crowd into dens wherein
decency is abolished, and the most ordinary conditions of healthful
existence are impossible of attainment; in which the pleasures
within reach are reduced to brutality and drunkenness; in which the
pains accumulate at compound interest in the shape of starvation,
disease, stunted development, and moral degradation; in which the
prospect of even steady and honest industry is a life of
unsuccessful battling with hunger, rounded by a pauper's grave."

In such conditions, the outlook for children is hopeless.  They die
like flies, and those that survive, survive because they possess
excessive vitality and a capacity of adaptation to the degradation
with which they are surrounded.  They have no home life.  In the
dens and lairs in which they live they are exposed to all that is
obscene and indecent.  And as their minds are made rotten, so are
their bodies made rotten by bad sanitation, overcrowding, and
underfeeding.  When a father and mother live with three or four
children in a room where the children take turn about in sitting up
to drive the rats away from the sleepers, when those children never
have enough to eat and are preyed upon and made miserable and weak
by swarming vermin, the sort of men and women the survivors will
make can readily be imagined.


"Dull despair and misery
Lie about them from their birth;
Ugly curses, uglier mirth,
Are their earliest lullaby."


A man and a woman marry and set up housekeeping in one room.  Their
income does not increase with the years, though their family does,
and the man is exceedingly lucky if he can keep his health and his
job.  A baby comes, and then another.  This means that more room
should be obtained; but these little mouths and bodies mean
additional expense and make it absolutely impossible to get more
spacious quarters.  More babies come.  There is not room in which to
turn around.  The youngsters run the streets, and by the time they
are twelve or fourteen the room-issue comes to a head, and out they
go on the streets for good.  The boy, if he be lucky, can manage to
make the common lodging-houses, and he may have any one of several
ends.  But the girl of fourteen or fifteen, forced in this manner to
leave the one room called home, and able to earn at the best a
paltry five or six shillings per week, can have but one end.  And
the bitter end of that one end is such as that of the woman whose
body the police found this morning in a doorway in Dorset Street,
Whitechapel.  Homeless, shelterless, sick, with no one with her in
her last hour, she had died in the night of exposure.  She was
sixty-two years old and a match vendor.  She died as a wild animal
dies.

Fresh in my mind is the picture of a boy in the dock of an East End
police court.  His head was barely visible above the railing.  He
was being proved guilty of stealing two shillings from a woman,
which he had spent, not for candy and cakes and a good time, but for
food.

"Why didn't you ask the woman for food?" the magistrate demanded, in
a hurt sort of tone.  "She would surely have given you something to
eat."

"If I 'ad arsked 'er, I'd got locked up for beggin'," was the boy's
reply.

The magistrate knitted his brows and accepted the rebuke.  Nobody
knew the boy, nor his father or mother.  He was without beginning or
antecedent, a waif, a stray, a young cub seeking his food in the
jungle of empire, preying upon the weak and being preyed upon by the
strong.

The people who try to help, who gather up the Ghetto children and
send them away on a day's outing to the country, believe that not
very many children reach the age of ten without having had at least
one day there.  Of this, a writer says:  "The mental change caused
by one day so spent must not be undervalued.  Whatever the
circumstances, the children learn the meaning of fields and woods,
so that descriptions of country scenery in the books they read,
which before conveyed no impression, become now intelligible."

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

The Rev. J. Cartmel Robinson tells of a boy and girl of his parish
who set out to walk to the forest.  They walked and walked through
the never-ending streets, expecting always to see it by-and-by;
until they sat down at last, faint and despairing, and were rescued
by a kind woman who brought them back.  Evidently they had been
overlooked by the people who try to help.

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

He tells of a member of his congregation who let a basement room to
a married couple.  "They said they had two children; when they got
possession it turned out that they had four.  After a while a fifth
appeared, and the landlord gave them notice to quit.  They paid no
attention to it.  Then the sanitary inspector who has to wink at the
law so often, came in and threatened my friend with legal
proceedings.  He pleaded that he could not get them out.  They
pleaded that nobody would have them with so many children at a
rental within their means, which is one of the commonest complaints
of the poor, by-the-bye.  What was to be done?  The landlord was
between two millstones.  Finally he applied to the magistrate, who
sent up an officer to inquire into the case.  Since that time about
twenty days have elapsed, and nothing has yet been done.  Is this a
singular case?  By no means; it is quite common."

Last week the police raided a disorderly house.  In one room were
found two young children.  They were arrested and charged with being
inmates the same as the women had been.  Their father appeared at
the trial.  He stated that himself and wife and two older children,
besides the two in the dock, occupied that room; he stated also that
he occupied it because he could get no other room for the half-crown
a week he paid for it.  The magistrate discharged the two juvenile
offenders and warned the father that he was bringing his children up
unhealthily.

But there is no need further to multiply instances.  In London the
slaughter of the innocents goes on on a scale more stupendous than
any before in the history of the world.  And equally stupendous is
the callousness of the people who believe in Christ, acknowledge
God, and go to church regularly on Sunday.  For the rest of the week
they riot about on the rents and profits which come to them from the
East End stained with the blood of the children.  Also, at times, so
peculiarly are they made, they will take half a million of these
rents and profits and send it away to educate the black boys of the
Soudan.



CHAPTER XXIV--A VISION OF THE NIGHT



All these were years ago little red-coloured, pulpy infants, capable
of being kneaded, baked, into any social form you chose.--CARLYLE.


Late last night I walked along Commercial Street from Spitalfields
to Whitechapel, and still continuing south, down Leman Street to the
docks.  And as I walked I smiled at the East End papers, which,
filled with civic pride, boastfully proclaim that there is nothing
the matter with the East End as a living place for men and women.

It is rather hard to tell a tithe of what I saw.  Much of it is
untenable.  But in a general way I may say that I saw a nightmare, a
fearful slime that quickened the pavement with life, a mess of
unmentionable obscenity that put into eclipse the "nightly horror"
of Piccadilly and the Strand.  It WAS a menagerie of garmented
bipeds that looked something like humans and more like beasts, and
to complete the picture, brass-buttoned keepers kept order among
them when they snarled too fiercely.

I was glad the keepers were there, for I did not have on my
"seafaring" clothes, and I was what is called a "mark" for the
creatures of prey that prowled up and down.  At times, between
keepers, these males looked at me sharply, hungrily, gutter-wolves
that they were, and I was afraid of their hands, of their naked
hands, as one may be afraid of the paws of a gorilla.  They reminded
me of gorillas.  Their bodies were small, ill-shaped, and squat.
There were no swelling muscles, no abundant thews and wide-spreading
shoulders.  They exhibited, rather, an elemental economy of nature,
such as the cave-men must have exhibited.  But there was strength in
those meagre bodies, the ferocious, primordial strength to clutch
and gripe and tear and rend.  When they spring upon their human prey
they are known even to bend the victim backward and double its body
till the back is broken.  They possess neither conscience nor
sentiment, and they will kill for a half-sovereign, without fear or
favour, if they are given but half a chance.  They are a new
species, a breed of city savages.  The streets and houses, alleys
and courts, are their hunting grounds.  As valley and mountain are
to the natural savage, street and building are valley and mountain
to them.  The slum is their jungle, and they live and prey in the
jungle.

The dear soft people of the golden theatres and wonder-mansions of
the West End do not see these creatures, do not dream that they
exist.  But they are here, alive, very much alive in their jungle.
And woe the day, when England is fighting in her last trench, and
her able-bodied men are on the firing line!  For on that day they
will crawl out of their dens and lairs, and the people of the West
End will see them, as the dear soft aristocrats of Feudal France saw
them and asked one another, "Whence came they?"  "Are they men?"

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

And there were others, strange, weird faces and forms and twisted
monstrosities that shouldered me on every side, inconceivable types
of sodden ugliness, the wrecks of society, the perambulating
carcasses, the living deaths--women, blasted by disease and drink
till their shame brought not tuppence in the open mart; and men, in
fantastic rags, wrenched by hardship and exposure out of all
semblance of men, their faces in a perpetual writhe of pain,
grinning idiotically, shambling like apes, dying with every step
they took and each breath they drew.  And there were young girls, of
eighteen and twenty, with trim bodies and faces yet untouched with
twist and bloat, who had fetched the bottom of the Abyss plump, in
one swift fall.  And I remember a lad of fourteen, and one of six or
seven, white-faced and sickly, homeless, the pair of them, who sat
upon the pavement with their backs against a railing and watched it
all.

The unfit and the unneeded!  Industry does not clamour for them.
There are no jobs going begging through lack of men and women.  The
dockers crowd at the entrance gate, and curse and turn away when the
foreman does not give them a call.  The engineers who have work pay
six shillings a week to their brother engineers who can find nothing
to do; 514,000 textile workers oppose a resolution condemning the
employment of children under fifteen.  Women, and plenty to spare,
are found to toil under the sweat-shop masters for tenpence a day of
fourteen hours.  Alfred Freeman crawls to muddy death because he
loses his job.  Ellen Hughes Hunt prefers Regent's Canal to
Islington Workhouse.  Frank Cavilla cuts the throats of his wife and
children because he cannot find work enough to give them food and
shelter.

The unfit and the unneeded!  The miserable and despised and
forgotten, dying in the social shambles.  The progeny of
prostitution--of the prostitution of men and women and children, of
flesh and blood, and sparkle and spirit; in brief, the prostitution
of labour.  If this is the best that civilisation can do for the
human, then give us howling and naked savagery.  Far better to be a
people of the wilderness and desert, of the cave and the squatting-
place, than to be a people of the machine and the Abyss.



CHAPTER XXV--THE HUNGER WAIL



"My father has more stamina than I, for he is country-born."

The speaker, a bright young East Ender, was lamenting his poor
physical development.

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

"He had hard times, dad did.  He might have chucked us, but he
didn't.  He slaved all day, and at night he came home and cooked and
cared for us.  He was father and mother, both.  He did his best, but
we didn't have enough to eat.  We rarely saw meat, and then of the
worst.  And it is not good for growing kiddies to sit down to a
dinner of bread and a bit of cheese, and not enough of it.

"And what's the result?  I am undersized, and I haven't the stamina
of my dad.  It was starved out of me.  In a couple of generations
there'll be no more of me here in London.  Yet there's my younger
brother; he's bigger and better developed.  You see, dad and we
children held together, and that accounts for it."

"But I don't see," I objected.  "I should think, under such
conditions, that the vitality should decrease and the younger
children be born weaker and weaker."

"Not when they hold together," he replied.  "Whenever you come along
in the East End and see a child of from eight to twelve, good-sized,
well-developed, and healthy-looking, just you ask and you will find
that it is the youngest in the family, or at least is one of the
younger.  The way of it is this:  the older children starve more
than the younger ones.  By the time the younger ones come along, the
older ones are starting to work, and there is more money coming in,
and more food to go around."

He pulled down his sleeve, a concrete instance of where chronic
semi-starvation kills not, but stunts.  His voice was but one among
the myriads that raise the cry of the hunger wail in the greatest
empire in the world.  On any one day, over 1,000,000 people are in
receipt of poor-law relief in the United Kingdom.  One in eleven of
the whole working-class receive poor-law relief in the course of the
year; 37,500,000 people receive less than 12 pounds per month, per
family; and a constant army of 8,000,000 lives on the border of
starvation.

A committee of the London County school board makes this
declaration:  "At times, WHEN THERE IS NO SPECIAL DISTRESS, 55,000
children in a state of hunger, which makes it useless to attempt to
teach them, are in the schools of London alone."  The italics are
mine.  "When there is no special distress" means good times in
England; for the people of England have come to look upon starvation
and suffering, which they call "distress," as part of the social
order.  Chronic starvation is looked upon as a matter of course.  It
is only when acute starvation makes its appearance on a large scale
that they think something is unusual

I shall never forget the bitter wail of a blind man in a little East
End shop at the close of a murky day.  He had been the eldest of
five children, with a mother and no father.  Being the eldest, he
had starved and worked as a child to put bread into the mouths of
his little brothers and sisters.  Not once in three months did he
ever taste meat.  He never knew what it was to have his hunger
thoroughly appeased.  And he claimed that this chronic starvation of
his childhood had robbed him of his sight.  To support the claim, he
quoted from the report of the Royal Commission on the Blind,
"Blindness is more prevalent in poor districts, and poverty
accelerates this dreadful affliction."

But he went further, this blind man, and in his voice was the
bitterness of an afflicted man to whom society did not give enough
to eat.  He was one of an enormous army of blind in London, and he
said that in the blind homes they did not receive half enough to
eat.  He gave the diet for a day:-


Breakfast--0.75 pint of skilly and dry bread.
Dinner   --3 oz. meat.
            1 slice of bread.
            0.5 lb. potatoes.
Supper   --0.75 pint of skilly and dry bread.


Oscar Wilde, God rest his soul, voices the cry of the prison child,
which, in varying degree, is the cry of the prison man and woman:-

"The second thing from which a child suffers in prison is hunger.
The food that is given to it consists of a piece of usually bad-
baked prison bread and a tin of water for breakfast at half-past
seven.  At twelve o'clock it gets dinner, composed of a tin of
coarse Indian meal stirabout (skilly), and at half-past five it gets
a piece of dry bread and a tin of water for its supper.  This diet
in the case of a strong grown man is always productive of illness of
some kind, chiefly of course diarrhoea, with its attendant weakness.
In fact, in a big prison astringent medicines are served out
regularly by the warders as a matter of course.  In the case of a
child, the child is, as a rule, incapable of eating the food at all.
Any one who knows anything about children knows how easily a child's
digestion is upset by a fit of crying, or trouble and mental
distress of any kind.  A child who has been crying all day long, and
perhaps half the night, in a lonely dim-lit cell, and is preyed upon
by terror, simply cannot eat food of this coarse, horrible kind.  In
the case of the little child to whom Warder Martin gave the
biscuits, the child was crying with hunger on Tuesday morning, and
utterly unable to eat the bread and water served to it for its
breakfast.  Martin went out after the breakfasts had been served and
bought the few sweet biscuits for the child rather than see it
starving.  It was a beautiful action on his part, and was so
recognised by the child, who, utterly unconscious of the regulations
of the Prison Board, told one of the senior wardens how kind this
junior warden had been to him.  The result was, of course, a report
and a dismissal."

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


PAUPER    DIET          SOLDIER
3.25 oz.  Meat          12 oz.
15.5 oz.  Bread         24 oz.
6 oz.     Vegetables     8 oz.


The adult male pauper gets meat (outside of soup) but once a week,
and the paupers "have nearly all that pallid, pasty complexion which
is the sure mark of starvation."

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


OFFICER    DIET          PAUPER
7 lb.      Bread         6.75 lb.
5 lb.      Meat          1 lb. 2 oz.
12 oz.     Bacon         2.5 oz.
8 oz.      Cheese        2 oz.
7 lb.      Potatoes      1.5 lb.
6 lb.      Vegetables    none.
1 lb.      Flour         none.
2 oz.      Lard          none.
12 oz.     Butter        7 oz.
none.      Rice Pudding  1 lb.


And as the same writer remarks:  "The officer's diet is still more
liberal than the pauper's; but evidently it is not considered
liberal enough, for a footnote is added to the officer's table
saying that 'a cash payment of two shillings and sixpence a week is
also made to each resident officer and servant.'  If the pauper has
ample food, why does the officer have more?  And if the officer has
not too much, can the pauper be properly fed on less than half the
amount?"

But it is not alone the Ghetto-dweller, the prisoner, and the pauper
that starve.  Hodge, of the country, does not know what it is always
to have a full belly.  In truth, it is his empty belly which has
driven him to the city in such great numbers.  Let us investigate
the way of living of a labourer from a parish in the Bradfield Poor
Law Union, Berks.  Supposing him to have two children, steady work,
a rent-free cottage, and an average weekly wage of thirteen
shillings, which is equivalent to $3.25, then here is his weekly
budget:-

                                      s.  d.
Bread (5 quarterns)                   1   10
Flour (0.5 gallon)                    0   4
Tea (0.25 lb.)                        0   6
Butter (1 lb.)                        1   3
Lard (1 lb.)                          0   6
Sugar (6 lb.)                         1   0
Bacon or other meat (about 0.25 lb.)  2   8
Cheese (1 lb.)                        0   8
Milk (half-tin condensed)             0   3.25
Coal                                  1   6
Beer                                  none
Tobacco                               none
Insurance ("Prudential")              0   3
Labourers' Union                      0   1
Wood, tools, dispensary, &c.          0   6
Insurance ("Foresters") and margin    1   1.75
        for clothes
Total                                13   0


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

               s.   d.
Men            6    1.5
Women          5    6.5
Children       5    1.25


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

               s.   d.
Himself        6    1.5
Wife           5    6.5
Two children  10    2.5
Total         21    10.5
Or roughly, $5.46


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

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

This must be understood, and understood clearly:  WHATEVER IS TRUE
OF LONDON IN THE WAY OF POVERTY AND DEGRADATION, IS TRUE OF ALL
ENGLAND.  While Paris is not by any means France, the city of London
is England.  The frightful conditions which mark London an inferno
likewise mark the United Kingdom an inferno.  The argument that the
decentralisation of London would ameliorate conditions is a vain
thing and false.  If the 6,000,000 people of London were separated
into one hundred cities each with a population of 60,000, misery
would be decentralised but not diminished.  The sum of it would
remain as large.

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

After listening to the wail of an old Irish peasant in Kerry, Robert
Blatchford asked him what he wanted.  "The old man leaned upon his
spade and looked out across the black peat fields at the lowering
skies.  'What is it that I'm wantun?' he said; then in a deep
plaintive tone he continued, more to himself than to me, 'All our
brave bhoys and dear gurrls is away an' over the says, an' the agent
has taken the pig off me, an' the wet has spiled the praties, an'
I'm an owld man, AN' I WANT THE DAY AV JUDGMENT.'"

The Day of Judgment!  More than he want it.  From all the land rises
the hunger wail, from Ghetto and countryside, from prison and casual
ward, from asylum and workhouse--the cry of the people who have not
enough to eat.  Millions of people, men, women, children, little
babes, the blind, the deaf, the halt, the sick, vagabonds and
toilers, prisoners and paupers, the people of Ireland, England,
Scotland, Wales, who have not enough to eat.  And this, in face of
the fact that five men can produce bread for a thousand; that one
workman can produce cotton cloth for 250 people, woollens for 300,
and boots and shoes for 1000.  It would seem that 40,000,000 people
are keeping a big house, and that they are keeping it badly.  The
income is all right, but there is something criminally wrong with
the management.  And who dares to say that it is not criminally
mismanaged, this big house, when five men can produce bread for a
thousand, and yet millions have not enough to eat?



CHAPTER XXVI--DRINK, TEMPERANCE, AND THRIFT



The English working classes may be said to be soaked in beer.  They
are made dull and sodden by it.  Their efficiency is sadly impaired,
and they lose whatever imagination, invention, and quickness may be
theirs by right of race.  It may hardly be called an acquired habit,
for they are accustomed to it from their earliest infancy.  Children
are begotten in drunkenness, saturated in drink before they draw
their first breath, born to the smell and taste of it, and brought
up in the midst of it.

The public-house is ubiquitous.  It flourishes on every corner and
between corners, and it is frequented almost as much by women as by
men.  Children are to be found in it as well, waiting till their
fathers and mothers are ready to go home, sipping from the glasses
of their elders, listening to the coarse language and degrading
conversation, catching the contagion of it, familiarising themselves
with licentiousness and debauchery.

Mrs. Grundy rules as supremely over the workers as she does over the
bourgeoisie; but in the case of the workers, the one thing she does
not frown upon is the public-house.  No disgrace or shame attaches
to it, nor to the young woman or girl who makes a practice of
entering it.

I remember a girl in a coffee-house saying, "I never drink spirits
when in a public-'ouse."  She was a young and pretty waitress, and
she was laying down to another waitress her pre-eminent
respectability and discretion.  Mrs. Grundy drew the line at
spirits, but allowed that it was quite proper for a clean young girl
to drink beer, and to go into a public-house to drink it.

Not only is this beer unfit for the people to drink, but too often
the men and women are unfit to drink it.  On the other hand, it is
their very unfitness that drives them to drink it.  Ill-fed,
suffering from innutrition and the evil effects of overcrowding and
squalor, their constitutions develop a morbid craving for the drink,
just as the sickly stomach of the overstrung Manchester factory
operative hankers after excessive quantities of pickles and similar
weird foods.  Unhealthy working and living engenders unhealthy
appetites and desires.  Man cannot be worked worse than a horse is
worked, and be housed and fed as a pig is housed and fed, and at the
same time have clean and wholesome ideals and aspirations.

As home-life vanishes, the public-house appears.  Not only do men
and women abnormally crave drink, who are overworked, exhausted,
suffering from deranged stomachs and bad sanitation, and deadened by
the ugliness and monotony of existence, but the gregarious men and
women who have no home-life flee to the bright and clattering
public-house in a vain attempt to express their gregariousness.  And
when a family is housed in one small room, home-life is impossible.

A brief examination of such a dwelling will serve to bring to light
one important cause of drunkenness.  Here the family arises in the
morning, dresses, and makes its toilet, father, mother, sons, and
daughters, and in the same room, shoulder to shoulder (for the room
is small), the wife and mother cooks the breakfast.  And in the same
room, heavy and sickening with the exhalations of their packed
bodies throughout the night, that breakfast is eaten.  The father
goes to work, the elder children go to school or into the street,
and the mother remains with her crawling, toddling youngsters to do
her housework--still in the same room.  Here she washes the clothes,
filling the pent space with soapsuds and the smell of dirty clothes,
and overhead she hangs the wet linen to dry.

Here, in the evening, amid the manifold smells of the day, the
family goes to its virtuous couch.  That is to say, as many as
possible pile into the one bed (if bed they have), and the surplus
turns in on the floor.  And this is the round of their existence,
month after month, year after year, for they never get a vacation
save when they are evicted.  When a child dies, and some are always
bound to die, since fifty-five per cent. of the East End children
die before they are five years old, the body is laid out in the same
room.  And if they are very poor, it is kept for some time until
they can bury it.  During the day it lies on the bed; during the
night, when the living take the bed, the dead occupies the table,
from which, in the morning, when the dead is put back into the bed,
they eat their breakfast.  Sometimes the body is placed on the shelf
which serves as a pantry for their food.  Only a couple of weeks
ago, an East End woman was in trouble, because, in this fashion,
being unable to bury it, she had kept her dead child three weeks.

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

Then there are the insecurity of happiness, the precariousness of
existence, the well-founded fear of the future--potent factors in
driving people to drink.  Wretchedness squirms for alleviation, and
in the public-house its pain is eased and forgetfulness is obtained.
It is unhealthy.  Certainly it is, but everything else about their
lives is unhealthy, while this brings the oblivion that nothing else
in their lives can bring.  It even exalts them, and makes them feel
that they are finer and better, though at the same time it drags
them down and makes them more beastly than ever.  For the
unfortunate man or woman, it is a race between miseries that ends
with death.

It is of no avail to preach temperance and teetotalism to these
people.  The drink habit may be the cause of many miseries; but it
is, in turn, the effect of other and prior miseries.  The temperance
advocates may preach their hearts out over the evils of drink, but
until the evils that cause people to drink are abolished, drink and
its evils will remain.

Until the people who try to help realise this, their well-
intentioned efforts will be futile, and they will present a
spectacle fit only to set Olympus laughing.  I have gone through an
exhibition of Japanese art, got up for the poor of Whitechapel with
the idea of elevating them, of begetting in them yearnings for the
Beautiful and True and Good.  Granting (what is not so) that the
poor folk are thus taught to know and yearn after the Beautiful and
True and Good, the foul facts of their existence and the social law
that dooms one in three to a public-charity death, demonstrate that
this knowledge and yearning will be only so much of an added curse
to them.  They will have so much more to forget than if they had
never known and yearned.  Did Destiny to-day bind me down to the
life of an East End slave for the rest of my years, and did Destiny
grant me but one wish, I should ask that I might forget all about
the Beautiful and True and Good; that I might forget all I had
learned from the open books, and forget the people I had known, the
things I had heard, and the lands I had seen.  And if Destiny didn't
grant it, I am pretty confident that I should get drunk and forget
it as often as possible.

These people who try to help!  Their college settlements, missions,
charities, and what not, are failures.  In the nature of things they
cannot but be failures.  They are wrongly, though sincerely,
conceived.  They approach life through a misunderstanding of life,
these good folk.  They do not understand the West End, yet they come
down to the East End as teachers and savants.  They do not
understand the simple sociology of Christ, yet they come to the
miserable and the despised with the pomp of social redeemers.  They
have worked faithfully, but beyond relieving an infinitesimal
fraction of misery and collecting a certain amount of data which
might otherwise have been more scientifically and less expensively
collected, they have achieved nothing.

As some one has said, they do everything for the poor except get off
their backs.  The very money they dribble out in their child's
schemes has been wrung from the poor.  They come from a race of
successful and predatory bipeds who stand between the worker and his
wages, and they try to tell the worker what he shall do with the
pitiful balance left to him.  Of what use, in the name of God, is it
to establish nurseries for women workers, in which, for instance, a
child is taken while the mother makes violets in Islington at three
farthings a gross, when more children and violet-makers than they
can cope with are being born right along?  This violet-maker handles
each flower four times, 576 handlings for three farthings, and in
the day she handles the flowers 6912 times for a wage of ninepence.
She is being robbed.  Somebody is on her back, and a yearning for
the Beautiful and True and Good will not lighten her burden.  They
do nothing for her, these dabblers; and what they do not do for the
mother, undoes at night, when the child comes home, all that they
have done for the child in the day.

And one and all, they join in teaching a fundamental lie.  They do
not know it is a lie, but their ignorance does not make it more of a
truth.  And the lie they preach is "thrift."  An instant will
demonstrate it.  In overcrowded London, the struggle for a chance to
work is keen, and because of this struggle wages sink to the lowest
means of subsistence.  To be thrifty means for a worker to spend
less than his income--in other words, to live on less.  This is
equivalent to a lowering of the standard of living.  In the
competition for a chance to work, the man with a lower standard of
living will underbid the man with a higher standard.  And a small
group of such thrifty workers in any overcrowded industry will
permanently lower the wages of that industry.  And the thrifty ones
will no longer be thrifty, for their income will have been reduced
till it balances their expenditure.

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

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

Every twenty-four hours in the year Dr. Barnardo snatches nine waifs
from the streets; so the enormous field he has to work in may be
comprehended.  The people who try to help have something to learn
from him.  He does not play with palliatives.  He traces social
viciousness and misery to their sources.  He removes the progeny of
the gutter-folk from their pestilential environment, and gives them
a healthy, wholesome environment in which to be pressed and prodded
and moulded into men.

When the people who try to help cease their playing and dabbling
with day nurseries and Japanese art exhibits and go back and learn
their West End and the sociology of Christ, they will be in better
shape to buckle down to the work they ought to be doing in the
world.  And if they do buckle down to the work, they will follow Dr.
Barnardo's lead, only on a scale as large as the nation is large.
They won't cram yearnings for the Beautiful, and True, and Good down
the throat of the woman making violets for three farthings a gross,
but they will make somebody get off her back and quit cramming
himself till, like the Romans, he must go to a bath and sweat it
out.  And to their consternation, they will find that they will have
to get off that woman's back themselves, as well as the backs of a
few other women and children they did not dream they were riding
upon.



CHAPTER XXVII--THE MANAGEMENT



In this final chapter it were well to look at the Social Abyss in
its widest aspect, and to put certain questions to Civilisation, by
the answers to which Civilisation must stand or fall.  For instance,
has Civilisation bettered the lot of man?  "Man," I use in its
democratic sense, meaning the average man.  So the question re-
shapes itself:  HAS CIVILISATION BETTERED THE LOT OF THE AVERAGE
MAN?

Let us see.  In Alaska, along the banks of the Yukon River, near its
mouth, live the Innuit folk.  They are a very primitive people,
manifesting but mere glimmering adumbrations of that tremendous
artifice, Civilisation.  Their capital amounts possibly to 2 pounds
per head.  They hunt and fish for their food with bone-headed spews
and arrows.  They never suffer from lack of shelter.  Their clothes,
largely made from the skins of animals, are warm.  They always have
fuel for their fires, likewise timber for their houses, which they
build partly underground, and in which they lie snugly during the
periods of intense cold.  In the summer they live in tents, open to
every breeze and cool.  They are healthy, and strong, and happy.
Their one problem is food.  They have their times of plenty and
times of famine.  In good times they feast; in bad times they die of
starvation.  But starvation, as a chronic condition, present with a
large number of them all the time, is a thing unknown.  Further,
they have no debts.

In the United Kingdom, on the rim of the Western Ocean, live the
English folk.  They are a consummately civilised people.  Their
capital amounts to at least 300 pounds per head.  They gain their
food, not by hunting and fishing, but by toil at colossal artifices.
For the most part, they suffer from lack of shelter.  The greater
number of them are vilely housed, do not have enough fuel to keep
them warm, and are insufficiently clothed.  A constant number never
have any houses at all, and sleep shelterless under the stars.  Many
are to be found, winter and summer, shivering on the streets in
their rags.  They have good times and bad.  In good times most of
them manage to get enough to eat, in bad times they die of
starvation.  They are dying now, they were dying yesterday and last
year, they will die to-morrow and next year, of starvation; for
they, unlike the Innuit, suffer from a chronic condition of
starvation.  There are 40,000,000 of the English folk, and 939 out
of every 1000 of them die in poverty, while a constant army of
8,000,000 struggles on the ragged edge of starvation.  Further, each
babe that is born, is born in debt to the sum of 22 pounds.  This is
because of an artifice called the National Debt.

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

The creature comforts man enjoys are the products of man's labour.
Since Civilisation has failed to give the average Englishman food
and shelter equal to that enjoyed by the Innuit, the question
arises:  HAS CIVILISATION INCREASED THE PRODUCING POWER OF THE
AVERAGE MAN?  If it has not increased man's producing power, then
Civilisation cannot stand.

But, it will be instantly admitted, Civilisation has increased man's
producing power.  Five men can produce bread for a thousand.  One
man can produce cotton cloth for 250 people, woollens for 300, and
boots and shoes for 1000.  Yet it has been shown throughout the
pages of this book that English folk by the millions do not receive
enough food, clothes, and boots.  Then arises the third and
inexorable question:  IF CIVILISATION HAS INCREASED THE PRODUCING
POWER OF THE AVERAGE MAN, WHY HAS IT NOT BETTERED THE LOT OF THE
AVERAGE MAN?

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

One other alternative, and one other only, presents itself.
CIVILISATION MUST BE COMPELLED TO BETTER THE LOT OF THE AVERAGE MEN.
This accepted, it becomes at once a question of business management.
Things profitable must be continued; things unprofitable must be
eliminated.  Either the Empire is a profit to England, or it is a
loss.  If it is a loss, it must be done away with.  If it is a
profit, it must be managed so that the average man comes in for a
share of the profit.

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

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

In short, society must be reorganised, and a capable management put
at the head.  That the present management is incapable, there can be
no discussion.  It has drained the United Kingdom of its life-blood.
It has enfeebled the stay-at-home folk till they are unable longer
to struggle in the van of the competing nations.  It has built up a
West End and an East End as large as the Kingdom is large, in which
one end is riotous and rotten, the other end sickly and underfed.

A vast empire is foundering on the hands of this incapable
management.  And by empire is meant the political machinery which
holds together the English-speaking people of the world outside of
the United States.  Nor is this charged in a pessimistic spirit.
Blood empire is greater than political empire, and the English of
the New World and the Antipodes are strong and vigorous as ever.
But the political empire under which they are nominally assembled is
perishing.  The political machine known as the British Empire is
running down.  In the hands of its management it is losing momentum
every day.

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

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

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


CHALLENGE


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LONGFELLOW



Footnotes:

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

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

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