CHAPTER NINETEEN. The people of the abyss, | ||
19. CHAPTER NINETEEN.
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 our maidens by the thousand on the street;
There the master scrimps his haggard seamstress of her daily bread;
There a 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.
-TENNYSON.
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
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
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
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 $4.50 to $5.25. 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 towards 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
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 gray with insects. Deceased was very badly nourished and was very emaciated.
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 headman 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
'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
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 laborer 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 10 houses- 51 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 6 houses and 22 rooms were 84 people- again, 6,
7, 8, and 9 being the number living in one room, in several instances.
In one house with 8 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 $1.00 to $1.50 per week for one room, while skilled mechanics, earning $8.75 per week, are forced to part with $3.75 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 $3.25 to $4.50; in another street from $2.75 to $4; and in another street, from $2.75 to $3.75; while in Whitechapel, two-room houses that recently rented for $2.50 are now costing $5.25. East, west, north, and south, the rents are going up. When land is worth from $100,000 to $150,000 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 14 shillings per week. She gets her living by letting the house to lodgers and doing a day's washing or charing. That woman, with tears in her eyes, told me that the landlord had increased the rent from 14 shillings to 18 shillings. What could the
Class supremacy can rest only on class degradation; and when the
workers are segregated in the Ghetto, they cannot escape the
consequent degradation. A short and stunted people is created,- a
breed strikingly differentiated from their masters' breed, a
pavement folk, as it were, lacking stamina and strength. The men
become caricatures of what physical men ought to be, and their women
and children are pale and anaemic, with eyes ringed darkly, who
stoop and slouch, and are early twisted out of all shapeliness and
beauty.
To make matters worse, the men of the Ghetto are the men who are left, a deteriorated stock left to undergo still further deterioration. For a hundred and fifty years, at least, they have been drained of their best. The strong men, the men of pluck, initiative, and ambition, have been faring forth to the fresher and freer portions of the globe, to make new lands and nations. Those who are lacking, the weak of heart and head and hand, as well as the rotten and hopeless, have remained to carry on the breed. And year by year, in turn, the best they breed are taken from them. Wherever a man of vigor 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
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
The wives become screaming harridans or broken-spirited and doglike,
lose what little decency and
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 overwrought 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 of the whole proletarian population, whose
Ninety per cent! The figures are appalling, yet the Rev. 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 laborer 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 labor, to get
on.
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 color of life is gray 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 odors come drifting along the greasy wind, and the rain, when it falls, is more like grease than water
Here lives a population as dull and unimaginative as its long gray 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
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 'hoes.' The traditional silent
and reserved Englishman has passed away. The pavement folk are
noisy, voluble, highstrung, 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
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. Brutalized, 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 NINETEEN. The people of the abyss, | ||