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Title: The People of the Abyss

Author: Jack London

Release Date: March, 1999 [eBook #1688]
[Most recently updated: December 1, 2020]

Language: English

Character set encoding: UTF-8

Produced by: David Price

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE PEOPLE OF THE ABYSS ***

[Illustration]




The People of the Abyss

by Jack London


Contents

 PREFACE
 I. THE DESCENT
 II. JOHNNY UPRIGHT
 III. MY LODGING AND SOME OTHERS
 IV. A MAN AND THE ABYSS
 V. THOSE ON THE EDGE
 VI. FRYING-PAN ALLEY AND A GLIMPSE OF INFERNO
 VII. A WINNER OF THE VICTORIA CROSS
 VIII. THE CARTER AND THE CARPENTER
 IX. THE SPIKE
 X. CARRYING THE BANNER
 XI. THE PEG
 XII. CORONATION DAY
 XIII. DAN CULLEN, DOCKER
 XIV. HOPS AND HOPPERS
 XV. THE SEA WIFE
 XVI. PROPERTY VERSUS PERSON
 XVII. INEFFICIENCY
 XVIII. WAGES
 XIX. THE GHETTO
 XX. COFFEE-HOUSES AND DOSS-HOUSES
 XXI. THE PRECARIOUSNESS OF LIFE
 XXII. SUICIDE
 XXIII. THE CHILDREN
 XXIV. A VISION OF THE NIGHT
 XXV. THE HUNGER WAIL
 XXVI. DRINK, TEMPERANCE, AND THRIFT
 XXVII. THE MANAGEMENT


The chief priests and rulers cry:—

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

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

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

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

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL.




PREFACE


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

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

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

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

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

JACK LONDON.


PIEDMONT, CALIFORNIA.




CHAPTER I.
THE DESCENT


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

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

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

“The very places I wish to see,” I broke in.

“But you can’t, you know,” was the unfailing rejoinder.

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

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

“Then I shall go to Cook’s,” I announced.

“Oh yes,” they said, with relief. “Cook’s will be sure to know.”

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

“You can’t do it, you know,” said the human emporium of routes and
fares at Cook’s Cheapside branch. “It is so—hem—so unusual.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It is so unprecedented, you know,” he added apologetically.

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

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

Again he hemmed and hawed.

“Of course,” I hastily anticipated, “I know it is unprecedented, but—”

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

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

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

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

“Where, sir?” he demanded with frank surprise.

“To the East End, anywhere. Go on.”

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

“I say,” he said, “wot plyce yer wanter go?”

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

“But wot’s the haddress, sir?”

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

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

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

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

“Stepney, sir; Stepney Station,” the cabby called down.

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

“Well,” I said.

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

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

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

“Won’tcher py me?” he pleaded. “There’s seven an’ six owin’ me.”

“Yes,” I laughed, “and it would be the last I’d see of you.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




CHAPTER II.
JOHNNY UPRIGHT


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




CHAPTER III.
MY LODGING AND SOME OTHERS


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




CHAPTER IV.
A MAN AND THE ABYSS


“I say, can you let a lodging?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Then I’ll have to look along a bit,” I said, with marked
disappointment.

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

“But I don’t want to sleep with two other men,” I objected.

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

“How much?” I demanded.

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

“I suppose he’s saving money right along,” I insinuated innocently.

“Bless you, no! Nor can ’e do as well helsewhere with ’is money.”

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

“How long have you been here?” I asked.

“Thirteen years, sir; an’ don’t you think you’ll fancy the lodgin’?”

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

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

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

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

“Vycytion!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SELF-NEGLECT


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


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

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

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




CHAPTER V.
THOSE ON THE EDGE


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes?”

“Yes!”

“Yes?”

“Yes!”

“Yes?”

“Yes!”

“Yes?”

“Yes!”

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

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

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




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


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

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

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

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

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

“How tall are you?”

“Five foot two,” he answered proudly; “an’ the chaps at the shop . . .
”

“Let me see that shop,” I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I clean my teeth,” he added, “else they’d be worse.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was this sleeping that puzzled me. Why were nine out of ten of them
asleep or trying to sleep? But it was not till afterwards that I
learned. _It is a law of the powers that be that the homeless shall not
sleep by night_. On the pavement, by the portico of Christ’s Church,
where the stone pillars rise toward the sky in a stately row, were
whole rows of men lying asleep or drowsing, and all too deep sunk in
torpor to rouse or be made curious by our intrusion.

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

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

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

He said it with a cheerful sneer.

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




CHAPTER VII.
A WINNER OF THE VICTORIA CROSS


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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“How many more do they want?”

“Twenty-four,” came the answer.

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

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

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

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




CHAPTER VIII.
THE CARTER AND THE CARPENTER


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_From the slimy, spittle-drenched, sidewalk, they were picking up bits
of orange peel, apple skin, and grape stems, and, they were eating
them. The pits of greengage plums they cracked between their teeth for
the kernels inside. They picked up stray bits of bread the size of
peas, apple cores so black and dirty one would not take them to be
apple cores, and these things these two men took into their mouths, and
chewed them, and swallowed them; and this, between six and seven
o’clock in the evening of August 20, year of our Lord 1902, in the
heart of the greatest, wealthiest, and most powerful empire the world
has ever seen_.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You do get good skilly at ’Ackney,” said the Carter.

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

“Flour an’ water at St. George’s in the East,” said the Carter.

The Carpenter nodded. He had tried them all.

“Then what?” I demanded

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

“’Tisn’t always six ounces,” corrected the Carter.

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

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

“Then what?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Ring the bell,” said the Carter to me.

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

“Oh! Oh!” they cried in one terrified voice. “Not so ’ard!”

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

“Press the button,” I said to the Carpenter.

“No, no, wait a bit,” the Carter hurriedly interposed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Two slices an’ a cup of tea,” meekly said the Carter.

“Two slices an’ a cup of tea,” meekly said the Carpenter.

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

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

“First cup o’ tea I’ve ’ad in a fortnight,” said the Carter.

“Wonderful tea, that,” said the Carpenter.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I’ve gone three days and never broke my fast,” said the Carter.

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

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

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

“It’s wrong to waste,” said he.

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




CHAPTER IX.
THE SPIKE


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I met a ‘towny,’ and he stood me too good a dinner,” I explained.

“An’ I ’aven’t ’ad a bite since yesterday mornin’,” he replied.

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

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

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

“What does he say?” I asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

A general chorus verified this statement.

“But they’re bloomin’ clever, them chaps,” said an admiring voice.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“An’ get fourteen days?”

“No; get away.”

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

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

“You cawn’t ever come back ’ere again for a doss,” they warned me.

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

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




CHAPTER X.
CARRYING THE BANNER


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

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

 [1] This in the Klondike.—J. L.


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

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

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

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

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

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

“Come on,” I said. “Let’s climb over and get a good sleep.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




CHAPTER XI.
THE PEG


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Got ter sty fer the service,” was the answer.

“Do you want to stay?” I asked.

They shook their heads.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes,” he snorted.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Didn’t you know you had to stay for services?” he asked.

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

He meditated a moment. “You can go,” he said.

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

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




CHAPTER XII.
CORONATION DAY


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


SWINBURNE.


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

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

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

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

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

 [2] “Runt” in America is the equivalent of the English “crowl,” the
 dwarf of a litter.


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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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


Whereupon, being girded, he gave heed to the Archbishop’s exhortation:—

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


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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“But your belly is empty,” I said.

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

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

“No ’e ayn’t,” the man cried heatedly. “’E’s a Yank, that’s wot ’e is.
I know.”

“Lord lumme, look a’ that,” she exclaimed, as we debouched upon the
Strand, choked with the roaring, reeling Coronation crowd, the men
bellowing and the girls singing in high throaty notes:—

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


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

“I’m Irish,” she said, in answer to a question. “My nyme’s Eyethorne.”

“What?” I asked.

“Eyethorne, sir; Eyethorne.”

“Spell it.”

“H-a-y-t-h-o-r-n-e, Eyethorne.’

“Oh,” I said, “Irish Cockney.”

“Yes, sir, London-born.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Work’ouse,” said he.

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

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

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

“But I don’t see how that is to feed you,” I objected.

The pair smiled knowingly.

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

“It’s s’prisin’, the food wot some people leaves,” the woman broke in.

“The thing,” said the man judicially, as the trick dawned upon me, “is
to get ’old o’ the penny.”

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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




CHAPTER XIII.
DAN CULLEN, DOCKER


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




CHAPTER XIV.
HOPS AND HOPPERS


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

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

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

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

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

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


Then there have been numberless paragraphs like this:—

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Do you twig?” Bert whispered. “She’s on to you.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I say, matey, I’m beastly hungry,” said I to Bert. We had not had any
dinner.

“Blimey, but I could eat the ’ops,” he replied.

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

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

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

“No more ’ops, matey,” Bert complained.

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

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

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

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

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




CHAPTER XV.
THE SEA WIFE


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And which son is this?” I asked.

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

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

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


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

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

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




CHAPTER XVI.
PROPERTY VERSUS PERSON


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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




CHAPTER XVII.
INEFFICIENCY


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

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

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

“But ’ow about the wife an’ kiddies?” his interlocutor demanded.

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

“But wyges don’t come down where there’s a union,” the objection was
made.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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


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

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

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




CHAPTER XVIII.
WAGES


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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




CHAPTER XIX.
THE GHETTO


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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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


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

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

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

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

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




CHAPTER XX.
COFFEE-HOUSES AND DOSS-HOUSES


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

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

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

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

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

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

 [3] The San Francisco bricklayer receives twenty shillings per day,
 and at present is on strike for twenty-four shillings.


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You must be getting along in years,” I suggested.

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

“Where’d you find it?” she at length demanded.

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

“Wot’s yer gyme?” she queried, looking me calmly in the eyes.

“I makes ’em,” quoth I.

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

“I’ll give you a ha’penny for another lump of sugar in the tea,” I
said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




CHAPTER XXI.
THE PRECARIOUSNESS OF LIFE


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sir A. Forwood calculates that—

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


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

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

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

In many instances little if any sunlight could get to the courts, and
the atmosphere within the dwellings was always foul, owing largely to
the saturated condition of the walls and ceilings, which for so many
years had absorbed the exhalations of the occupants into their porous
material. Singular testimony to the absence of sunlight in these courts
was furnished by the action of the Parks and Gardens Committee, who
desired to brighten the homes of the poorest class by gifts of growing
flowers and window-boxes; but these gifts could not be made in courts
such as these, _as flowers and plants were susceptible to the
unwholesome surroundings, and would not live_.


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

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

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

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

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

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


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


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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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




CHAPTER XXII.
SUICIDE


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Anything to say?” the magistrate demanded abruptly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

She was last seen at one in the morning. Three hours later her hat and
jacket were found on the towing path by the Regent’s Canal, and later
her body was fished from the water. _Verdict: Suicide during temporary
insanity_.

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




CHAPTER XXIII.
THE CHILDREN


“Where home is a hovel, and dull we grovel,
    Forgetting the world is fair.”


There is one beautiful sight in the East End, and only one, and it is
the children dancing in the street when the organ-grinder goes his
round. It is fascinating to watch them, the new-born, the next
generation, swaying and stepping, with pretty little mimicries and
graceful inventions all their own, with muscles that move swiftly and
easily, and bodies that leap airily, weaving rhythms never taught in
dancing school.

I have talked with these children, here, there, and everywhere, and
they struck me as being bright as other children, and in many ways even
brighter. They have most active little imaginations. Their capacity for
projecting themselves into the realm of romance and fantasy is
remarkable. A joyous life is romping in their blood. They delight in
music, and motion, and colour, and very often they betray a startling
beauty of face and form under their filth and rags.

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

The children of the Ghetto possess all the qualities which make for
noble manhood and womanhood; but the Ghetto itself, like an infuriated
tigress turning on its young, turns upon and destroys all these
qualities, blots out the light and laughter, and moulds those it does
not kill into sodden and forlorn creatures, uncouth, degraded, and
wretched below the beasts of the field.

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

“Any one who is acquainted with the state of the population of all
great industrial centres, whether in this or other countries, is aware
that amidst a large and increasing body of that population there reigns
supreme . . . that condition which the French call _la misère_, a word
for which I do not think there is any exact English equivalent. It is a
condition in which the food, warmth, and clothing which are necessary
for the mere maintenance of the functions of the body in their normal
state cannot be obtained; in which men, women, and children are forced
to crowd into dens wherein decency is abolished, and the most ordinary
conditions of healthful existence are impossible of attainment; in
which the pleasures within reach are reduced to brutality and
drunkenness; in which the pains accumulate at compound interest in the
shape of starvation, disease, stunted development, and moral
degradation; in which the prospect of even steady and honest industry
is a life of unsuccessful battling with hunger, rounded by a pauper’s
grave.”

In such conditions, the outlook for children is hopeless. They die like
flies, and those that survive, survive because they possess excessive
vitality and a capacity of adaptation to the degradation with which
they are surrounded. They have no home life. In the dens and lairs in
which they live they are exposed to all that is obscene and indecent.
And as their minds are made rotten, so are their bodies made rotten by
bad sanitation, overcrowding, and underfeeding. When a father and
mother live with three or four children in a room where the children
take turn about in sitting up to drive the rats away from the sleepers,
when those children never have enough to eat and are preyed upon and
made miserable and weak by swarming vermin, the sort of men and women
the survivors will make can readily be imagined.

“Dull despair and misery
Lie about them from their birth;
Ugly curses, uglier mirth,
Are their earliest lullaby.”


A man and a woman marry and set up housekeeping in one room. Their
income does not increase with the years, though their family does, and
the man is exceedingly lucky if he can keep his health and his job. A
baby comes, and then another. This means that more room should be
obtained; but these little mouths and bodies mean additional expense
and make it absolutely impossible to get more spacious quarters. More
babies come. There is not room in which to turn around. The youngsters
run the streets, and by the time they are twelve or fourteen the
room-issue comes to a head, and out they go on the streets for good.
The boy, if he be lucky, can manage to make the common lodging-houses,
and he may have any one of several ends. But the girl of fourteen or
fifteen, forced in this manner to leave the one room called home, and
able to earn at the best a paltry five or six shillings per week, can
have but one end. And the bitter end of that one end is such as that of
the woman whose body the police found this morning in a doorway in
Dorset Street, Whitechapel. Homeless, shelterless, sick, with no one
with her in her last hour, she had died in the night of exposure. She
was sixty-two years old and a match vendor. She died as a wild animal
dies.

Fresh in my mind is the picture of a boy in the dock of an East End
police court. His head was barely visible above the railing. He was
being proved guilty of stealing two shillings from a woman, which he
had spent, not for candy and cakes and a good time, but for food.

“Why didn’t you ask the woman for food?” the magistrate demanded, in a
hurt sort of tone. “She would surely have given you something to eat.”

“If I ’ad arsked ’er, I’d got locked up for beggin’,” was the boy’s
reply.

The magistrate knitted his brows and accepted the rebuke. Nobody knew
the boy, nor his father or mother. He was without beginning or
antecedent, a waif, a stray, a young cub seeking his food in the jungle
of empire, preying upon the weak and being preyed upon by the strong.

The people who try to help, who gather up the Ghetto children and send
them away on a day’s outing to the country, believe that not very many
children reach the age of ten without having had at least one day
there. Of this, a writer says: “The mental change caused by one day so
spent must not be undervalued. Whatever the circumstances, the children
learn the meaning of fields and woods, so that descriptions of country
scenery in the books they read, which before conveyed no impression,
become now intelligible.”

One day in the fields and woods, if they are lucky enough to be picked
up by the people who try to help! And they are being born faster every
day than they can be carted off to the fields and woods for the one day
in their lives. One day! In all their lives, one day! And for the rest
of the days, as the boy told a certain bishop, “At ten we ’ops the wag;
at thirteen we nicks things; an’ at sixteen we bashes the copper.”
Which is to say, at ten they play truant, at thirteen steal, and at
sixteen are sufficiently developed hooligans to smash the policemen.

The Rev. J. Cartmel Robinson tells of a boy and girl of his parish who
set out to walk to the forest. They walked and walked through the
never-ending streets, expecting always to see it by-and-by; until they
sat down at last, faint and despairing, and were rescued by a kind
woman who brought them back. Evidently they had been overlooked by the
people who try to help.

The same gentleman is authority for the statement that in a street in
Hoxton (a district of the vast East End), over seven hundred children,
between five and thirteen years, live in eighty small houses. And he
adds: “It is because London has largely shut her children in a maze of
streets and houses and robbed them of their rightful inheritance in sky
and field and brook, that they grow up to be men and women physically
unfit.”

He tells of a member of his congregation who let a basement room to a
married couple. “They said they had two children; when they got
possession it turned out that they had four. After a while a fifth
appeared, and the landlord gave them notice to quit. They paid no
attention to it. Then the sanitary inspector who has to wink at the law
so often, came in and threatened my friend with legal proceedings. He
pleaded that he could not get them out. They pleaded that nobody would
have them with so many children at a rental within their means, which
is one of the commonest complaints of the poor, by-the-bye. What was to
be done? The landlord was between two millstones. Finally he applied to
the magistrate, who sent up an officer to inquire into the case. Since
that time about twenty days have elapsed, and nothing has yet been
done. Is this a singular case? By no means; it is quite common.”

Last week the police raided a disorderly house. In one room were found
two young children. They were arrested and charged with being inmates
the same as the women had been. Their father appeared at the trial. He
stated that himself and wife and two older children, besides the two in
the dock, occupied that room; he stated also that he occupied it
because he could get no other room for the half-crown a week he paid
for it. The magistrate discharged the two juvenile offenders and warned
the father that he was bringing his children up unhealthily.

But there is no need further to multiply instances. In London the
slaughter of the innocents goes on on a scale more stupendous than any
before in the history of the world. And equally stupendous is the
callousness of the people who believe in Christ, acknowledge God, and
go to church regularly on Sunday. For the rest of the week they riot
about on the rents and profits which come to them from the East End
stained with the blood of the children. Also, at times, so peculiarly
are they made, they will take half a million of these rents and profits
and send it away to educate the black boys of the Soudan.




CHAPTER XXIV.
A VISION OF THE NIGHT


All these were years ago little red-coloured, pulpy infants, capable of
being kneaded, baked, into any social form you chose.—CARLYLE.


Late last night I walked along Commercial Street from Spitalfields to
Whitechapel, and still continuing south, down Leman Street to the
docks. And as I walked I smiled at the East End papers, which, filled
with civic pride, boastfully proclaim that there is nothing the matter
with the East End as a living place for men and women.

It is rather hard to tell a tithe of what I saw. Much of it is
untenable. But in a general way I may say that I saw a nightmare, a
fearful slime that quickened the pavement with life, a mess of
unmentionable obscenity that put into eclipse the “nightly horror” of
Piccadilly and the Strand. It _was_ a menagerie of garmented bipeds
that looked something like humans and more like beasts, and to complete
the picture, brass-buttoned keepers kept order among them when they
snarled too fiercely.

I was glad the keepers were there, for I did not have on my “seafaring”
clothes, and I was what is called a “mark” for the creatures of prey
that prowled up and down. At times, between keepers, these males looked
at me sharply, hungrily, gutter-wolves that they were, and I was afraid
of their hands, of their naked hands, as one may be afraid of the paws
of a gorilla. They reminded me of gorillas. Their bodies were small,
ill-shaped, and squat. There were no swelling muscles, no abundant
thews and wide-spreading shoulders. They exhibited, rather, an
elemental economy of nature, such as the cave-men must have exhibited.
But there was strength in those meagre bodies, the ferocious,
primordial strength to clutch and gripe and tear and rend. When they
spring upon their human prey they are known even to bend the victim
backward and double its body till the back is broken. They possess
neither conscience nor sentiment, and they will kill for a
half-sovereign, without fear or favour, if they are given but half a
chance. They are a new species, a breed of city savages. The streets
and houses, alleys and courts, are their hunting grounds. As valley and
mountain are to the natural savage, street and building are valley and
mountain to them. The slum is their jungle, and they live and prey in
the jungle.

The dear soft people of the golden theatres and wonder-mansions of the
West End do not see these creatures, do not dream that they exist. But
they are here, alive, very much alive in their jungle. And woe the day,
when England is fighting in her last trench, and her able-bodied men
are on the firing line! For on that day they will crawl out of their
dens and lairs, and the people of the West End will see them, as the
dear soft aristocrats of Feudal France saw them and asked one another,
“Whence came they?” “Are they men?”

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

And there were others, strange, weird faces and forms and twisted
monstrosities that shouldered me on every side, inconceivable types of
sodden ugliness, the wrecks of society, the perambulating carcasses,
the living deaths—women, blasted by disease and drink till their shame
brought not tuppence in the open mart; and men, in fantastic rags,
wrenched by hardship and exposure out of all semblance of men, their
faces in a perpetual writhe of pain, grinning idiotically, shambling
like apes, dying with every step they took and each breath they drew.
And there were young girls, of eighteen and twenty, with trim bodies
and faces yet untouched with twist and bloat, who had fetched the
bottom of the Abyss plump, in one swift fall. And I remember a lad of
fourteen, and one of six or seven, white-faced and sickly, homeless,
the pair of them, who sat upon the pavement with their backs against a
railing and watched it all.

The unfit and the unneeded! Industry does not clamour for them. There
are no jobs going begging through lack of men and women. The dockers
crowd at the entrance gate, and curse and turn away when the foreman
does not give them a call. The engineers who have work pay six
shillings a week to their brother engineers who can find nothing to do;
514,000 textile workers oppose a resolution condemning the employment
of children under fifteen. Women, and plenty to spare, are found to
toil under the sweat-shop masters for tenpence a day of fourteen hours.
Alfred Freeman crawls to muddy death because he loses his job. Ellen
Hughes Hunt prefers Regent’s Canal to Islington Workhouse. Frank
Cavilla cuts the throats of his wife and children because he cannot
find work enough to give them food and shelter.

The unfit and the unneeded! The miserable and despised and forgotten,
dying in the social shambles. The progeny of prostitution—of the
prostitution of men and women and children, of flesh and blood, and
sparkle and spirit; in brief, the prostitution of labour. If this is
the best that civilisation can do for the human, then give us howling
and naked savagery. Far better to be a people of the wilderness and
desert, of the cave and the squatting-place, than to be a people of the
machine and the Abyss.




CHAPTER XXV.
THE HUNGER WAIL


“My father has more stamina than I, for he is country-born.”

The speaker, a bright young East Ender, was lamenting his poor physical
development.

“Look at my scrawny arm, will you.” He pulled up his sleeve. “Not
enough to eat, that’s what’s the matter with it. Oh, not now. I have
what I want to eat these days. But it’s too late. It can’t make up for
what I didn’t have to eat when I was a kiddy. Dad came up to London
from the Fen Country. Mother died, and there were six of us kiddies and
dad living in two small rooms.

“He had hard times, dad did. He might have chucked us, but he didn’t.
He slaved all day, and at night he came home and cooked and cared for
us. He was father and mother, both. He did his best, but we didn’t have
enough to eat. We rarely saw meat, and then of the worst. And it is not
good for growing kiddies to sit down to a dinner of bread and a bit of
cheese, and not enough of it.

“And what’s the result? I am undersized, and I haven’t the stamina of
my dad. It was starved out of me. In a couple of generations there’ll
be no more of me here in London. Yet there’s my younger brother; he’s
bigger and better developed. You see, dad and we children held
together, and that accounts for it.”

“But I don’t see,” I objected. “I should think, under such conditions,
that the vitality should decrease and the younger children be born
weaker and weaker.”

“Not when they hold together,” he replied. “Whenever you come along in
the East End and see a child of from eight to twelve, good-sized,
well-developed, and healthy-looking, just you ask and you will find
that it is the youngest in the family, or at least is one of the
younger. The way of it is this: the older children starve more than the
younger ones. By the time the younger ones come along, the older ones
are starting to work, and there is more money coming in, and more food
to go around.”

He pulled down his sleeve, a concrete instance of where chronic
semi-starvation kills not, but stunts. His voice was but one among the
myriads that raise the cry of the hunger wail in the greatest empire in
the world. On any one day, over 1,000,000 people are in receipt of
poor-law relief in the United Kingdom. One in eleven of the whole
working-class receive poor-law relief in the course of the year;
37,500,000 people receive less than £12 per month, per family; and a
constant army of 8,000,000 lives on the border of starvation.

A committee of the London County school board makes this declaration:
“At times, _when there is no special distress_, 55,000 children in a
state of hunger, which makes it useless to attempt to teach them, are
in the schools of London alone.” The italics are mine. “When there is
no special distress” means good times in England; for the people of
England have come to look upon starvation and suffering, which they
call “distress,” as part of the social order. Chronic starvation is
looked upon as a matter of course. It is only when acute starvation
makes its appearance on a large scale that they think something is
unusual.

I shall never forget the bitter wail of a blind man in a little East
End shop at the close of a murky day. He had been the eldest of five
children, with a mother and no father. Being the eldest, he had starved
and worked as a child to put bread into the mouths of his little
brothers and sisters. Not once in three months did he ever taste meat.
He never knew what it was to have his hunger thoroughly appeased. And
he claimed that this chronic starvation of his childhood had robbed him
of his sight. To support the claim, he quoted from the report of the
Royal Commission on the Blind, “Blindness is more prevalent in poor
districts, and poverty accelerates this dreadful affliction.”

But he went further, this blind man, and in his voice was the
bitterness of an afflicted man to whom society did not give enough to
eat. He was one of an enormous army of blind in London, and he said
that in the blind homes they did not receive half enough to eat. He
gave the diet for a day:—

Breakfast—0.75 pint of skilly and dry bread.
Dinner   —3 oz. meat.
            1 slice of bread.
            0.5 lb. potatoes.
Supper   —0.75 pint of skilly and dry bread.

Oscar Wilde, God rest his soul, voices the cry of the prison child,
which, in varying degree, is the cry of the prison man and woman:—

“The second thing from which a child suffers in prison is hunger. The
food that is given to it consists of a piece of usually bad-baked
prison bread and a tin of water for breakfast at half-past seven. At
twelve o’clock it gets dinner, composed of a tin of coarse Indian meal
stirabout (skilly), and at half-past five it gets a piece of dry bread
and a tin of water for its supper. This diet in the case of a strong
grown man is always productive of illness of some kind, chiefly of
course diarrhoea, with its attendant weakness. In fact, in a big prison
astringent medicines are served out regularly by the warders as a
matter of course. In the case of a child, the child is, as a rule,
incapable of eating the food at all. Any one who knows anything about
children knows how easily a child’s digestion is upset by a fit of
crying, or trouble and mental distress of any kind. A child who has
been crying all day long, and perhaps half the night, in a lonely
dim-lit cell, and is preyed upon by terror, simply cannot eat food of
this coarse, horrible kind. In the case of the little child to whom
Warder Martin gave the biscuits, the child was crying with hunger on
Tuesday morning, and utterly unable to eat the bread and water served
to it for its breakfast. Martin went out after the breakfasts had been
served and bought the few sweet biscuits for the child rather than see
it starving. It was a beautiful action on his part, and was so
recognised by the child, who, utterly unconscious of the regulations of
the Prison Board, told one of the senior wardens how kind this junior
warden had been to him. The result was, of course, a report and a
dismissal.”

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

PAUPER    DIET          SOLDIER
3.25 oz.  Meat          12 oz.
15.5 oz.  Bread         24 oz.
6 oz.     Vegetables     8 oz.

The adult male pauper gets meat (outside of soup) but once a week, and
the paupers “have nearly all that pallid, pasty complexion which is the
sure mark of starvation.”

Here is a table, comparing the workhouse officer’s weekly allowance:—

OFFICER    DIET          PAUPER
7 lb.      Bread         6.75 lb.
5 lb.      Meat          1 lb. 2 oz.
12 oz.     Bacon         2.5 oz.
8 oz.      Cheese        2 oz.
7 lb.      Potatoes      1.5 lb.
6 lb.      Vegetables    none.
1 lb.      Flour         none.
2 oz.      Lard          none.
12 oz.     Butter        7 oz.
none.      Rice Pudding  1 lb.

And as the same writer remarks: “The officer’s diet is still more
liberal than the pauper’s; but evidently it is not considered liberal
enough, for a footnote is added to the officer’s table saying that ‘a
cash payment of two shillings and sixpence a week is also made to each
resident officer and servant.’ If the pauper has ample food, why does
the officer have more? And if the officer has not too much, can the
pauper be properly fed on less than half the amount?”

But it is not alone the Ghetto-dweller, the prisoner, and the pauper
that starve. Hodge, of the country, does not know what it is always to
have a full belly. In truth, it is his empty belly which has driven him
to the city in such great numbers. Let us investigate the way of living
of a labourer from a parish in the Bradfield Poor Law Union, Berks.
Supposing him to have two children, steady work, a rent-free cottage,
and an average weekly wage of thirteen shillings, which is equivalent
to $3.25, then here is his weekly budget:—

                                      s.  d.
Bread (5 quarterns)                   1   10
Flour (0.5 gallon)                    0   4
Tea (0.25 lb.)                        0   6
Butter (1 lb.)                        1   3
Lard (1 lb.)                          0   6
Sugar (6 lb.)                         1   0
Bacon or other meat (about 0.25 lb.)  2   8
Cheese (1 lb.)                        0   8
Milk (half-tin condensed)             0   3.25
Coal                                  1   6
Beer                                  none
Tobacco                               none
Insurance (“Prudential”)              0   3
Labourers’ Union                      0   1
Wood, tools, dispensary, &c.      0   6
Insurance (“Foresters”) and margin    1   1.75
        for clothes
Total                                13   0

The guardians of the workhouse in the above Union pride themselves on
their rigid economy. It costs per pauper per week:—

               s.   d.
Men            6    1.5
Women          5    6.5
Children       5    1.25

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

               s.   d.
Himself        6    1.5
Wife           5    6.5
Two children  10    2.5
Total         21    10.5
Or roughly, $5.46

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

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

This must be understood, and understood clearly: _Whatever is true of
London in the way of poverty and degradation, is true of all England_.
While Paris is not by any means France, the city of London is England.
The frightful conditions which mark London an inferno likewise mark the
United Kingdom an inferno. The argument that the decentralisation of
London would ameliorate conditions is a vain thing and false. If the
6,000,000 people of London were separated into one hundred cities each
with a population of 60,000, misery would be decentralised but not
diminished. The sum of it would remain as large.

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

After listening to the wail of an old Irish peasant in Kerry, Robert
Blatchford asked him what he wanted. “The old man leaned upon his spade
and looked out across the black peat fields at the lowering skies.
‘What is it that I’m wantun?’ he said; then in a deep plaintive tone he
continued, more to himself than to me, ‘All our brave bhoys and dear
gurrls is away an’ over the says, an’ the agent has taken the pig off
me, an’ the wet has spiled the praties, an’ I’m an owld man, _an’ I
want the Day av Judgment_.’”

The Day of Judgment! More than he want it. From all the land rises the
hunger wail, from Ghetto and countryside, from prison and casual ward,
from asylum and workhouse—the cry of the people who have not enough to
eat. Millions of people, men, women, children, little babes, the blind,
the deaf, the halt, the sick, vagabonds and toilers, prisoners and
paupers, the people of Ireland, England, Scotland, Wales, who have not
enough to eat. And this, in face of the fact that five men can produce
bread for a thousand; that one workman can produce cotton cloth for 250
people, woollens for 300, and boots and shoes for 1000. It would seem
that 40,000,000 people are keeping a big house, and that they are
keeping it badly. The income is all right, but there is something
criminally wrong with the management. And who dares to say that it is
not criminally mismanaged, this big house, when five men can produce
bread for a thousand, and yet millions have not enough to eat?




CHAPTER XXVI.
DRINK, TEMPERANCE, AND THRIFT


The English working classes may be said to be soaked in beer. They are
made dull and sodden by it. Their efficiency is sadly impaired, and
they lose whatever imagination, invention, and quickness may be theirs
by right of race. It may hardly be called an acquired habit, for they
are accustomed to it from their earliest infancy. Children are begotten
in drunkenness, saturated in drink before they draw their first breath,
born to the smell and taste of it, and brought up in the midst of it.

The public-house is ubiquitous. It flourishes on every corner and
between corners, and it is frequented almost as much by women as by
men. Children are to be found in it as well, waiting till their fathers
and mothers are ready to go home, sipping from the glasses of their
elders, listening to the coarse language and degrading conversation,
catching the contagion of it, familiarising themselves with
licentiousness and debauchery.

Mrs. Grundy rules as supremely over the workers as she does over the
bourgeoisie; but in the case of the workers, the one thing she does not
frown upon is the public-house. No disgrace or shame attaches to it,
nor to the young woman or girl who makes a practice of entering it.

I remember a girl in a coffee-house saying, “I never drink spirits when
in a public-’ouse.” She was a young and pretty waitress, and she was
laying down to another waitress her pre-eminent respectability and
discretion. Mrs. Grundy drew the line at spirits, but allowed that it
was quite proper for a clean young girl to drink beer, and to go into a
public-house to drink it.

Not only is this beer unfit for the people to drink, but too often the
men and women are unfit to drink it. On the other hand, it is their
very unfitness that drives them to drink it. Ill-fed, suffering from
innutrition and the evil effects of overcrowding and squalor, their
constitutions develop a morbid craving for the drink, just as the
sickly stomach of the overstrung Manchester factory operative hankers
after excessive quantities of pickles and similar weird foods.
Unhealthy working and living engenders unhealthy appetites and desires.
Man cannot be worked worse than a horse is worked, and be housed and
fed as a pig is housed and fed, and at the same time have clean and
wholesome ideals and aspirations.

As home-life vanishes, the public-house appears. Not only do men and
women abnormally crave drink, who are overworked, exhausted, suffering
from deranged stomachs and bad sanitation, and deadened by the ugliness
and monotony of existence, but the gregarious men and women who have no
home-life flee to the bright and clattering public-house in a vain
attempt to express their gregariousness. And when a family is housed in
one small room, home-life is impossible.

A brief examination of such a dwelling will serve to bring to light one
important cause of drunkenness. Here the family arises in the morning,
dresses, and makes its toilet, father, mother, sons, and daughters, and
in the same room, shoulder to shoulder (for the room is small), the
wife and mother cooks the breakfast. And in the same room, heavy and
sickening with the exhalations of their packed bodies throughout the
night, that breakfast is eaten. The father goes to work, the elder
children go to school or into the street, and the mother remains with
her crawling, toddling youngsters to do her housework—still in the same
room. Here she washes the clothes, filling the pent space with soapsuds
and the smell of dirty clothes, and overhead she hangs the wet linen to
dry.

Here, in the evening, amid the manifold smells of the day, the family
goes to its virtuous couch. That is to say, as many as possible pile
into the one bed (if bed they have), and the surplus turns in on the
floor. And this is the round of their existence, month after month,
year after year, for they never get a vacation save when they are
evicted. When a child dies, and some are always bound to die, since
fifty-five per cent. of the East End children die before they are five
years old, the body is laid out in the same room. And if they are very
poor, it is kept for some time until they can bury it. During the day
it lies on the bed; during the night, when the living take the bed, the
dead occupies the table, from which, in the morning, when the dead is
put back into the bed, they eat their breakfast. Sometimes the body is
placed on the shelf which serves as a pantry for their food. Only a
couple of weeks ago, an East End woman was in trouble, because, in this
fashion, being unable to bury it, she had kept her dead child three
weeks.

Now such a room as I have described is not home but horror; and the men
and women who flee away from it to the public-house are to be pitied,
not blamed. There are 300,000 people, in London, divided into families
that live in single rooms, while there are 900,000 who are illegally
housed according to the Public Health Act of 1891—a respectable
recruiting-ground for the drink traffic.

Then there are the insecurity of happiness, the precariousness of
existence, the well-founded fear of the future—potent factors in
driving people to drink. Wretchedness squirms for alleviation, and in
the public-house its pain is eased and forgetfulness is obtained. It is
unhealthy. Certainly it is, but everything else about their lives is
unhealthy, while this brings the oblivion that nothing else in their
lives can bring. It even exalts them, and makes them feel that they are
finer and better, though at the same time it drags them down and makes
them more beastly than ever. For the unfortunate man or woman, it is a
race between miseries that ends with death.

It is of no avail to preach temperance and teetotalism to these people.
The drink habit may be the cause of many miseries; but it is, in turn,
the effect of other and prior miseries. The temperance advocates may
preach their hearts out over the evils of drink, but until the evils
that cause people to drink are abolished, drink and its evils will
remain.

Until the people who try to help realise this, their well-intentioned
efforts will be futile, and they will present a spectacle fit only to
set Olympus laughing. I have gone through an exhibition of Japanese
art, got up for the poor of Whitechapel with the idea of elevating
them, of begetting in them yearnings for the Beautiful and True and
Good. Granting (what is not so) that the poor folk are thus taught to
know and yearn after the Beautiful and True and Good, the foul facts of
their existence and the social law that dooms one in three to a
public-charity death, demonstrate that this knowledge and yearning will
be only so much of an added curse to them. They will have so much more
to forget than if they had never known and yearned. Did Destiny to-day
bind me down to the life of an East End slave for the rest of my years,
and did Destiny grant me but one wish, I should ask that I might forget
all about the Beautiful and True and Good; that I might forget all I
had learned from the open books, and forget the people I had known, the
things I had heard, and the lands I had seen. And if Destiny didn’t
grant it, I am pretty confident that I should get drunk and forget it
as often as possible.

These people who try to help! Their college settlements, missions,
charities, and what not, are failures. In the nature of things they
cannot but be failures. They are wrongly, though sincerely, conceived.
They approach life through a misunderstanding of life, these good folk.
They do not understand the West End, yet they come down to the East End
as teachers and savants. They do not understand the simple sociology of
Christ, yet they come to the miserable and the despised with the pomp
of social redeemers. They have worked faithfully, but beyond relieving
an infinitesimal fraction of misery and collecting a certain amount of
data which might otherwise have been more scientifically and less
expensively collected, they have achieved nothing.

As some one has said, they do everything for the poor except get off
their backs. The very money they dribble out in their child’s schemes
has been wrung from the poor. They come from a race of successful and
predatory bipeds who stand between the worker and his wages, and they
try to tell the worker what he shall do with the pitiful balance left
to him. Of what use, in the name of God, is it to establish nurseries
for women workers, in which, for instance, a child is taken while the
mother makes violets in Islington at three farthings a gross, when more
children and violet-makers than they can cope with are being born right
along? This violet-maker handles each flower four times, 576 handlings
for three farthings, and in the day she handles the flowers 6912 times
for a wage of ninepence. She is being robbed. Somebody is on her back,
and a yearning for the Beautiful and True and Good will not lighten her
burden. They do nothing for her, these dabblers; and what they do not
do for the mother, undoes at night, when the child comes home, all that
they have done for the child in the day.

And one and all, they join in teaching a fundamental lie. They do not
know it is a lie, but their ignorance does not make it more of a truth.
And the lie they preach is “thrift.” An instant will demonstrate it. In
overcrowded London, the struggle for a chance to work is keen, and
because of this struggle wages sink to the lowest means of subsistence.
To be thrifty means for a worker to spend less than his income—in other
words, to live on less. This is equivalent to a lowering of the
standard of living. In the competition for a chance to work, the man
with a lower standard of living will underbid the man with a higher
standard. And a small group of such thrifty workers in any overcrowded
industry will permanently lower the wages of that industry. And the
thrifty ones will no longer be thrifty, for their income will have been
reduced till it balances their expenditure.

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

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

Every twenty-four hours in the year Dr. Barnardo snatches nine waifs
from the streets; so the enormous field he has to work in may be
comprehended. The people who try to help have something to learn from
him. He does not play with palliatives. He traces social viciousness
and misery to their sources. He removes the progeny of the gutter-folk
from their pestilential environment, and gives them a healthy,
wholesome environment in which to be pressed and prodded and moulded
into men.

When the people who try to help cease their playing and dabbling with
day nurseries and Japanese art exhibits and go back and learn their
West End and the sociology of Christ, they will be in better shape to
buckle down to the work they ought to be doing in the world. And if
they do buckle down to the work, they will follow Dr. Barnardo’s lead,
only on a scale as large as the nation is large. They won’t cram
yearnings for the Beautiful, and True, and Good down the throat of the
woman making violets for three farthings a gross, but they will make
somebody get off her back and quit cramming himself till, like the
Romans, he must go to a bath and sweat it out. And to their
consternation, they will find that they will have to get off that
woman’s back themselves, as well as the backs of a few other women and
children they did not dream they were riding upon.




CHAPTER XXVII.
THE MANAGEMENT


In this final chapter it were well to look at the Social Abyss in its
widest aspect, and to put certain questions to Civilisation, by the
answers to which Civilisation must stand or fall. For instance, has
Civilisation bettered the lot of man? “Man,” I use in its democratic
sense, meaning the average man. So the question re-shapes itself: _Has
Civilisation bettered the lot of the average man_?

Let us see. In Alaska, along the banks of the Yukon River, near its
mouth, live the Innuit folk. They are a very primitive people,
manifesting but mere glimmering adumbrations of that tremendous
artifice, Civilisation. Their capital amounts possibly to £2 per head.
They hunt and fish for their food with bone-headed spears and arrows.
They never suffer from lack of shelter. Their clothes, largely made
from the skins of animals, are warm. They always have fuel for their
fires, likewise timber for their houses, which they build partly
underground, and in which they lie snugly during the periods of intense
cold. In the summer they live in tents, open to every breeze and cool.
They are healthy, and strong, and happy. Their one problem is food.
They have their times of plenty and times of famine. In good times they
feast; in bad times they die of starvation. But starvation, as a
chronic condition, present with a large number of them all the time, is
a thing unknown. Further, they have no debts.

In the United Kingdom, on the rim of the Western Ocean, live the
English folk. They are a consummately civilised people. Their capital
amounts to at least £300 per head. They gain their food, not by hunting
and fishing, but by toil at colossal artifices. For the most part, they
suffer from lack of shelter. The greater number of them are vilely
housed, do not have enough fuel to keep them warm, and are
insufficiently clothed. A constant number never have any houses at all,
and sleep shelterless under the stars. Many are to be found, winter and
summer, shivering on the streets in their rags. They have good times
and bad. In good times most of them manage to get enough to eat, in bad
times they die of starvation. They are dying now, they were dying
yesterday and last year, they will die to-morrow and next year, of
starvation; for they, unlike the Innuit, suffer from a chronic
condition of starvation. There are 40,000,000 of the English folk, and
939 out of every 1000 of them die in poverty, while a constant army of
8,000,000 struggles on the ragged edge of starvation. Further, each
babe that is born, is born in debt to the sum of £22. This is because
of an artifice called the National Debt.

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

The creature comforts man enjoys are the products of man’s labour.
Since Civilisation has failed to give the average Englishman food and
shelter equal to that enjoyed by the Innuit, the question arises: _Has
Civilisation increased the producing power of the average man_? If it
has not increased man’s producing power, then Civilisation cannot
stand.

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

There can be one answer only—MISMANAGEMENT. Civilisation has made
possible all manner of creature comforts and heart’s delights. In these
the average Englishman does not participate. If he shall be forever
unable to participate, then Civilisation falls. There is no reason for
the continued existence of an artifice so avowed a failure. But it is
impossible that men should have reared this tremendous artifice in
vain. It stuns the intellect. To acknowledge so crushing a defeat is to
give the death-blow to striving and progress.

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

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

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

In short, society must be reorganised, and a capable management put at
the head. That the present management is incapable, there can be no
discussion. It has drained the United Kingdom of its life-blood. It has
enfeebled the stay-at-home folk till they are unable longer to struggle
in the van of the competing nations. It has built up a West End and an
East End as large as the Kingdom is large, in which one end is riotous
and rotten, the other end sickly and underfed.

A vast empire is foundering on the hands of this incapable management.
And by empire is meant the political machinery which holds together the
English-speaking people of the world outside of the United States. Nor
is this charged in a pessimistic spirit. Blood empire is greater than
political empire, and the English of the New World and the Antipodes
are strong and vigorous as ever. But the political empire under which
they are nominally assembled is perishing. The political machine known
as the British Empire is running down. In the hands of its management
it is losing momentum every day.

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

Nor can one member of this managing class plead not guilty before the
judgment bar of Man. “The living in their houses, and in their graves
the dead,” are challenged by every babe that dies of innutrition, by
every girl that flees the sweater’s den to the nightly promenade of
Piccadilly, by every worked-out toiler that plunges into the canal. The
food this managing class eats, the wine it drinks, the shows it makes,
and the fine clothes it wears, are challenged by eight million mouths
which have never had enough to fill them, and by twice eight million
bodies which have never been sufficiently clothed and housed.

There can be no mistake. Civilisation has increased man’s producing
power an hundred-fold, and through mismanagement the men of
Civilisation live worse than the beasts, and have less to eat and wear
and protect them from the elements than the savage Innuit in a frigid
climate who lives to-day as he lived in the stone age ten thousand
years ago.



CHALLENGE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


LONGFELLOW




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