The People of the Abyss ......................................................................................................................................1

The experiences related in this volume fell to me in the summer of 1902. I went down into the underworld

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 underworld. That which made for more life, for physical and spiritual health, was good; that which

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

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 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

"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

"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

"You don't want to LIVE down there!" everybody said, with disapprobation writ large upon their faces.

"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

"But we know nothing of the East End. It is over there, somewhere." And they waved their hands vaguely in

But O Cook, O Thomas Cook Son, pathfinders and trailclearers, living signposts to all the world, and

bestowers of first aid to bewildered travellersunhesitatingly 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

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

"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

"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

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

He said it so cheerfully and coldbloodedly 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

"No, no," I answered; "merely to identify me in case I get into a scrape with the 'bobbies.'" This last I said

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

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

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

However, I departed with the address of a detective who lived in the East End, and took my way to the

American consulgeneral. 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

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 greywhiskered and eminently decorous personage who had imperturbably driven me

The hansom pursued an aimless way for several minutes, then came to a puzzled stop. The aperture above my

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

beersodden 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

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.

I looked about. It was really a railroad station, and he had driven desperately to it as the one familiar spot he

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

"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

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 highclass criminal from across the water, was what he took

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 wellworn 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

"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'

"How much will you give me for them?" I demanded suddenly. "I paid you ten bob for the lot, and I'll sell

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

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

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

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

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

goodbye to my foreboding friends. As I paused out of the door, the "help," a comely middleaged woman,

could not conquer a grin that twisted her lips and separated them till the throat, out of involuntary sympathy,

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 outatelbows 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" nowand 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 authoritythe 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

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 selfconscious sordidness by the hordes of cringing robbers who clutter his steps from dawn

till dark, and deplete his pocketbook 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

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 thirdclass 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

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 itwith the one exception of the stoker's singlet.

I shall not give you the address of Johnny Upright. Let it suffice that he lives in the most respectable street in

the East Enda 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 closepacked 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 brickwalled

yard behind, where, when it is not raining, one may look at a slatecoloured 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

welltodo as to keep a "slavey." Johnny Upright keeps one, as I well know, she being my first acquaintance

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

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

A change came over the face of things at once. The gentleman in question was at church, but would be home

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 publichouse. 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

And here to the doorstep came the "slavey," very frowzy and very perplexed, to tell me that the missus would

"So many people come 'ere lookin' for work," Mrs. Johnny Upright apologetically explained. "So I 'ope you

"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 rooma favour, I took it, in recompense for my grand manner.

This diningroom, 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

And here, while waiting the coming of Johnny Upright, let me explain my errand. While living, eating, and

sleeping with the people of the East End, it was my intention to have a port of refuge, not too far distant, into

which could run now and again to assure myself that good clothes and cleanliness still existed. Also in such

port I could receive my mail, work up my notes, and sally forth occasionally in changed garb to civilisation.

But this involved a dilemma. A lodging where my property would be safe implied a landlady apt to be

suspicious of a gentleman leading a double life; while a landlady who would not bother her head over the

double life of her lodgers would imply lodgings where property was unsafe. To avoid the dilemma was what

had brought me to Johnny Upright. A detective of thirtyodd 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

His two daughters beat him home from churchand 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

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

"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

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

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

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

halfadozen doors away, in his own respectable and opulent street, in a house as like to his own as a pea to

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

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

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

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

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 intoa reprehensible error on

Not only did the houses I investigated have no bathtubs, but I learned that there were no bathtubs 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 washbasin would be an

unfeasible undertaking. But, it seems, the compensation comes in with the saving of soap, so all's well, and

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 cubbyholes into which I had fitted them, my mind's eye had become

narrowangled, and I could not quite take in all of my own room at once. The immensity of it was

aweinspiring. Could this be the room I had rented for six shillings a week? Impossible! But my landlady,

"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.

And then she explained the process of saturation, by which the rental value of a neighbourhood went up,

"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 lowerclass 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

I looked at her. Here was a woman, of the finest grade of the English workingclass, 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

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

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

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.

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

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

But the sight of my ten shillings had made her keen. "I can let you have a nice bed in with two hother men,"

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

"'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 sixsix years, sir, an' two

months comin' nex' Saturday. 'E's a sceneshifter," 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

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.

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 halfpast 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 coffeehouse 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:

"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

"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 publichouse 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

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

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 Londonborn, 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 ita vain and useless

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 messboy, a few trips more as coaltrimmer, and then a fullfledged

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

"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, abangin' 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 troublescreechin' an' carryin' on, fightin', cuttin', bobbies, magistrates, an' a month's 'ard labour back of it

"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

"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' tena 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 acrying 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'

Without going further with the speech of this young fellow of two andtwenty, 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

A young sot; a premature wreck; physical inability to do a stoker's work; the gutter or the workhouse; and the

endhe 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

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

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 twoandtwenty, 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 sceneshifter 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

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

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 grandparents were born in London

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 today,

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.

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 bloodpoisoning from bedsores, due to selfneglect and filthy surroundings, and the jury

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 seventyseven years of age should die

of SELFNEGLECT 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

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?

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 reignedsometimes

whole rows of houses in little outoftheway 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,

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,

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

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

Leaving out the disease germs that fill the air of the East End, consider but the one item of smoke. Sir

William ThiseltonDyer, 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

twentyfour 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

It is incontrovertible that the children grow up into rotten adults, without virility or stamina, a weakkneed,

narrowchested, 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

So one is forced to conclude that the Abyss is literally a huge man killing machine, and when I pass along

the little outoftheway streets with the fullbellied 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 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

I talked with a woman who was representative of that type which has been jerked out of its little

outoftheway 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

gasring 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

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

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

dressskirts, mark you, lined up with two flounces, for seven shillings a dozen! This is equal to $1.75 per

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

week37.5 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

As I write this, and for an hour past, the air has been made hideous by a freeforall, roughandtumble

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

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

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

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

A lull; apparently one combatant temporarily disabled and being resuscitated; child's voice audible again, but

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

Entrance of new voices; a flank attack; strangle hold suddenly broken from the way bloody murder goes up

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

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 proBoer 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 tramcars; 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 bonesand 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

But up spoke my other companion, a man of twentyeight, who eked out a precarious existence in a sweating

"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

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,

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 Fryingpan 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

There were seven rooms in this abomination called a house. In six of the rooms, twentyodd 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

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

"The w'y 'e coughs is somethin' terrible," volunteered my sweated friend, referring to the dying boy. "We 'ear

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

My sweated friend, when work was to be had, toiled with four other men in his eightbyseven room. In the

winter a lamp burned nearly all the day and added its fumes to the overloaded air, which was breathed, and

In good times, when there was a rush of work, this man told me that he could earn as high as "thirty bob a

"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

I looked. The teeth were worn down by the constant friction of the metallic brads, while they were coalblack

After he had told me that the workers had to furnish their own tools, brads, "grindery," cardboard, rent, light,

"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

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 onestorey hovels, cowsheds, in which

people lived. The roofs of these hovels were covered with deposits of filth, in some places a couple of feet

deepthe 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

"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

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 betterclass workmen and artisans. The slum

"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 sharpspiked

iron fencing, as are all the parks of London Town, so that homeless men and women may not come in at night

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

We went up the narrow gravelled walk. On the benches on either side arrayed a mass of miserable and

distorted humanity, the sight of which would have impelled Dore to more diabolical flights of fancy than he

ever succeeded in achieving. It was a welter of rags and filth, of all manner of loathsome skin diseases, open

sores, bruises, grossness, indecency, leering monstrosities, and bestial faces. A chill, raw wind was blowing,

and these creatures huddled there in their rags, sleeping for the most part, or trying to sleep. Here were a

dozen women, ranging in age from twenty years to seventy. Next a babe, possibly of nine months, lying

asleep, flat on the hard bench, with neither pillow nor covering, nor with any one looking after it. Next

halfadozen 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

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

"Oh, why did you bring me here?" demanded the burning young socialist, his delicate face white with

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

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

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

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

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

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 goodbye to my friends, and with my heart going pitapat, 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

Next to me stood a short, stout man. Hale and hearty, though aged, strongfeatured, with the tough and

leathery skin produced by long years of sunbeat and weatherbeat, his was the unmistakable sea face and eyes;

"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 sunwash on the brine, I am paid in full for

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

"I won't stand it much longer, I won't," he was complaining to the man on the other side of him. "I'll smash a

windy, a big 'un, an' get run in for fourteen days. Then I'll have a good place to sleep, never fear, an' better

grub than you get here. Though I'd miss my bit of bacey"this as an afterthought, and said regretfully and

"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.

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

goodconduct stripes and the Victoria Cross, an' this is what I get for it. I wish I was dead, I wish I was dead.

The moisture rushed into his eyes, but, before the other man could comfort him, he began to hum a lilting sea

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

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

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.

Now, mark you, the sailor had been over forty years in the navy, had three goodconduct 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 namewell, 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

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

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

Then came the courtmartial, 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 prizemoney 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

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

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

The old manofwar'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

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

We looked ahead anxiously and counted. Thirtyfour 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.

Like a flash, for all his eightyseven 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 today. I come by at one o'clock, an' the

line was beginnin' to form thenpets, that's what they are. They let 'm in, the same ones, night upon night."

The Carter, with his cleancut face, chin beard, and shaved upper lip, I should have taken in the United States

for anything from a master workman to a welltodo farmer. The Carpenterwell, 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 fortyseven 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

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, fiftyeight years of age, had spent the last three nights without shelter or sleep, while the

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

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

Not so with these homeless ones who walked to Poplar Workhouse with me. And there are thirtyfive

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, illfed, 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

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

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

These two men talked. They were not fools, they were merely old. And, naturally, their guts areek 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 thingsin 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 spittledrenched sidewalk along Mile End Road to Poplar

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 tomorrow, let me out mornin' o' next day. What then? The law sez I can't get in another casual ward that

night less'n ten miles distant. Have to hurry an' walk to be there in time that day. What chance does that give

me to look for a job? S'pose I don't walk. S'pose I look for a job? In no time there's night come, an' no bed.

No sleep all night, nothin' to eat, what shape am I in the mornin' to look for work? Got to make up my sleep

in the park somehow" (the vision of Christ's Church, Spitalfield, was strong on me) "an' get something to eat.

"Used to be a tollgate '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 today," he concluded, after another long pause.

"I ain't 'ad anything today," 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

But what surprised me was that he should have the word "cant" in his vocabulary, a vocabulary that I found

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 threequarters

of a pint, and "skilly" is a fluid concoction of three quarts of oatmeal stirred into three buckets and a half of

"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

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

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 sixounce

"'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,

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

"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.

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

"But suppose, after you've had your night's sleep, you refuse to pick oakum, or break stones, or do any work

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

"Then comes dinner," he went on. "Eight ounces of bread, one and a arf ounces of cheese, an' cold water.

Then you finish your task an' 'ave supper, same as before, three parts o' skilly any six ounces o' bread. Then

to bed, six o'clock, an' next mornin' you're turned loose, provided you've finished your task."

We had long since left Mile End Road, and after traversing a gloomy maze of narrow, winding streets, we

came to Poplar Workhouse. On a low stone wall we spread our handkerchiefs, and each in his handkerchief

put all his worldly possessions, with the exception of the "bit o' baccy" down his sock. And then, as the last

light was fading from the drabcoloured sky, the wind blowing cheerless and cold, we stood, with our pitiful

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

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

I let go, and they looked reproachfully at me, as though I had imperilled their chance for a bed and three parts

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

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

"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 latterday

JacktheRipper, with a penchant for elderly male paupers. Or he may have thought I was inveigling him

It will be remembered, at the outset, that I sewed a pound inside my stoker's singlet under the armpit. This

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

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.

Stop a moment, and consider the situation. Here were two men, invited by me into the coffeehouse. 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

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 ordereggs, rashers of bacon, more eggs, more bacon, more

tea, more slices and so forththey denying wistfully all the while that they cared for anything more, and

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 "waterbewitched," 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

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 thirtyone, 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

The Carpenter had been born in the army, where his father had served twentytwo years. Likewise, his two

brothers had gone into the army; one, troop sergeantmajor 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

"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

"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

"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, sirto commit some big robbery. But when mornin' come, there was I, too weak

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 middleclass man, and a great deal better than some

of the middleclass 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 goodbye 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

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

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

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 twentytwo were to be admitted. By four o'clock

there were thirtyfour 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

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 coldblooded, matteroffact 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

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

himwho stood at the head of the linea 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

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 happenedthat 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

I was on the seafaringmanwhohadlosthisclothesandmoney 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

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 mothercountry.

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.ninetyfive hours per week, for which he had received twenty

"But the work and the long hours was killing me," he said, "and I had to chuck the job. I had a little money

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 onehundredandtenmile walk, where he thought he would eventually get a

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

Another beautiful touch was that displayed by the "Hopper" and his "ole woman." He had been in line about

halfanhour when the "ole woman" (his mate) came up to him. She was fairly clad, for her class, with a

weatherworn 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

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

"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

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

Two pound tentwelve dollars and a halffor 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 hoppicking,

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 goodnature 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

"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

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

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 awayneither 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 lightninglike 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

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

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,

threequarters 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 halfadozen 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

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

The pannikins scraped clean, conversation began to spring up. "This super'tendent 'ere is always writin' to the

"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

A roar of applause greeted the timehonoured yarn, and from somewhere over in the deeper darkness came

"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

"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

"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. Wintertime, 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

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

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 floora

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

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

A shirt was handed mewhich 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

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

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

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

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

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

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 messpieces 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 porkribs," 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'

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 porkribs, 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

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

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

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

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.

"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

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 seventyfour

degrees below zeroone hundred and six degrees of frost {1}; and though I suffered, it was a mere nothing

compared with carrying the banner for a night, ill fed, ill clad, and soaking wet.

The streets grew very quiet and lonely after the theatre crowd had gone home. Only were to be seen the

ubiquitous policemen, flashing their dark lanterns into doorways and alleys, and men and women and boys

taking shelter in the lee of buildings from the wind and rain. Piccadilly, however, was not quite so deserted.

Its pavements were brightened by welldressed 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,

At halfpast 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

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

Now, said I, at one o'clock, to myself; consider that you are a poor young man, penniless, in London Town,

and that tomorrow you must look for work. It is necessary, therefore, that you get some sleep in order that

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

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

"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 wretchedlooking youth,

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

"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

"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

Among those who carry the banner, Green Park has the reputation of opening its gates earlier than the other

parks, and at quarterpast 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

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

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 welldressed 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.

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 twentyfour hours; but, still adventuring as a penniless man looking

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 thingbreakfast in the morning, and then the whole day in which to look for

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

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

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; butand there we were, and there you

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 milliondollar banknotes. 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 halfpast 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

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 eightthirty, 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

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,

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 thema 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

There were fully a score of Americans in the crowd, the nonsailors 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

centurionI mean the adjutantwas not satisfied. In the dead silence he raised his voice again, and

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 downnot 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 "soulsnatchers" (as these men call all religious

propagandists), should study the physiological basis of psychology a little, if they wish to make their efforts

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

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 twentyfive minutes to twelve. Heighho, thought I, time is flying, and I

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

"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

He was really a good fellow, though he was startled by my request. "Wy," he said, "we're goin' to 'old

"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

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

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

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

"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 twentyfive minutes to twelve. I did not think when I came in that it would take so

"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

"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."

Now I submit, was this Christianlike, 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

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

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

"Certainly not," I answered, "or I should have gone without my breakfast. You have no placards posted to

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

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

O thou that seawalls 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 rusteaten, These wormcorroded lies That keep thy head stormbeaten, And sunlike strength of eyes From the open air and heaven Of intercepted skies!

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 fiveguinea 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 doublewalled with soldiers. The base of the Nelson Column was triplefringed 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 redcoats of the Royal Marines, and from the Union Club to the embouchure of

Whitehall swept the glittering, massive curve of the 1st Life Guardsgigantic men mounted on gigantic

chargers, steelbreastplated, steelhelmeted, steelcaparisoned, a great warsword 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 reservestall, wellfed men, with weapons to wield and muscles to

And as it was thus at Trafalgar Square, so was it along the whole line of marchforce, 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

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 oneroom 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

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:

And the Lord said unto Samuel: Now therefore hearken unto their voice; howbeit thou shalt show them the

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

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

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

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

And in these latter days, five hundred hereditary peers own one fifth of England; and they, and the officers

and servants under the King, and those who go to compose the powers that be, yearly spend in wasteful

luxury $1,850,000,000, or 370,000,000 pounds, which is thirtytwo per cent. of the total wealth produced by

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

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

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 robeslackeys 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

worldthe fighting men of England, masters of destruction, engineers of death! Another race of men from

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. Pellmell, 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

worldsoldiers 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,

HongKong, Jamaica, and WeiHaiWei; 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

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 feetI, 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

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 mumbojumbo foolery has come from fairyland, than to believe it the

performance of sane and sensible people who have mastered matter and solved the secrets of the stars.

Princes and princelings, dukes, duchesses, and all manner of coroneted folk of the royal train are flashing

past; more warriors, and lackeys, and conquered peoples, and the pagent is over. I drift with the crowd out of

the square into a tangle of narrow streets, where the publichouses are aroar with drunkenness, men,

women, and children mixed together in colossal debauch. And on every side is rising the favourite song of

"Oh! on Coronation Day, on Coronation Day, We'll have a spree, a jubilee, and shout, Hip, hip, hooray, For

we'll all be marry, drinking whisky, wine, and sherry, We'll all be merry on Coronation Day."

The rain is pouring down. Up the street come troops of the auxiliaries, black Africans and yellow Asiatics,

beturbaned and befezed, and coolies swinging along with machine guns and mountain batteries on their

heads, and the bare feet of all, in quick rhythm, going slish, slish, slish through the pavement mud. The

public houses empty by magic, and the swarthy allegiants are cheered by their British brothers, who return

"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, alyin' 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

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

"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 playnow

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

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 heartstrings 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

To use a Briticism, it was "cruel"; the corresponding Americanism was more appropriateit 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,

I talked with the man. He was fiftyfour and a brokendown 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 dosshouse. He had lived all his life in

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

"Wot a lot o' work puttin' up the lights," said the man at sight of some building superbly illuminated. This

was the keynote of his being. All his fife he had worked, and the whole objective universe, as well as his own

soul, he could express in terms only of work. "Coronations is some good," he went on. "They give work to

"Yes," he answered. "I tried, but there wasn't any chawnce. My age is against me. Wot do you work at?

"Lord lumne, look a' that," she exclaimed, as we debauched upon the Strand, choked with the roaring, reeling

Coronation crowd, the men bellowing and the girls singing in high throaty notes:

"Oh! on Coronation D'y, on Coronation D'y, We'll 'ave a spree, a jubilee, an' shout 'Ip, 'ip, 'ooray; For we'll all

be merry, drinkin' whisky, wine, and sherry, We'll all be merry on Coronation D'y."

"'Ow dirty I am, bein' around the w'y I 'ave," the woman said, as she sat down in a coffeehouse, 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,

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

The last place in which she had worked was a coffeehouse, 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

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."

"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

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

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

"You drink your tea in little sips," he went on, "making it last its longest. An' you look sharp, an' there's some

"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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Seven and twenty centuries agone! And it is all as true and apposite today in the innermost centre of this

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,

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

deathof an insect, for the place swarmed with vermin, a plague with which no person could cope

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,

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 youarticles 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

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 fruitporters, represented the dockers on the London Trades Council, and wrote trenchant articles for the

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

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,

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 bloodbespattered 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, greyishblack with dirt. And they

She washed his face, shook up his conch, and talked with him. It was interesting to talk with himuntil 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 deathbed; 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

Dan Cullen's feet became swollen with dropsy. He sat up all day on the side of the bed (to keep the water out

of his body), no mat on the floor, a thin blanket on his legs, and an old coat around his shoulders. A

missionary brought him a pair of paper slippers, worth fourpence (I saw them), and proceeded to offer up

fifty prayers or so for the good of Dan Cullen's soul. But Dan Cullen was the sort of man that wanted his soul

left alone. He did not care to have Tom, Dick, or Harry, on the strength of fourpenny slippers, tampering with

it. He asked the missionary kindly to open the window, so that he might toss the slippers out. And the

missionary went away, to return no more, likewise impressed with the ungratefulness of the poor.

The cobbler, a brave old hero himself, though unaneled and unsung, went privily to the head office of the big

fruit brokers for whom Dan Cullen had worked as a casual labourer for thirty years. Their system was such

that the work was almost entirely done by casual hands. The cobbler told them the man's desperate plight,

old, broken, dying, without help or money, reminded them that he had worked for them thirty years, and

"Oh," said the manager, remembering Dan Cullen without having to refer to the books, "you see, we make it

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.

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

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."

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

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 adventurelust 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 spursGod

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

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. Today it stands at 48,024, a decrease of 3103 from the acreage of last

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.

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 wellnigh 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 lowlying 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 ankledeep with hops.

Those that remained grumbled savagely among the halfstripped poles at the seven bushels for a shillinga

rate paid in good seasons when the hops are in prime condition, and a rate likewise paid in bad seasons by the

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,

All of which was too bad for the owners, certainly; but at the worst, not one of them, for one meal, would

have to go short of food or drink. Yet it was to them that the newspapers devoted columns of sympathy, their

pecuniary losses being detailed at harrowing length. "Mr. Herbert L calculates his loss at 8000 pounds;"

"Mr. F, of brewery fame, who rents all the land in this parish, loses 10,000 pounds;" and "Mr. L, the

Wateringbury brewer, brother to Mr. Herbert L, is another heavy loser." As for the hoppers, they did not

count. Yet I venture to assert that the several almostsquare meals lost by underfed William Buggles, and

underfed Mrs. Buggles, and the underfed Buggles kiddies, was a greater tragedy than the 10,000 pounds lost

by Mr. F. And in addition, underfed William Buggles' tragedy might be multiplied by thousands where Mr.

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 illdressed 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

"beanfeasters" 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 gypsylooking woman to her mates, as we came up a long row of bins into which

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

"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 hardluck 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

"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 polepuller 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 halfadozen

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

As the afternoon wore along, we realised that living wages could not be madeby 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 halfadozen children. For it is the woman and the halfdozen children who count as a

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 polepuller, 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

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 withhelda 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 earthhungry, 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.

It was five o'clock, and the polepullers 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 halfadozen

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 eightpence 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 tallykeeper, short of change, gave us sixpence. Entreaty was in vain.

A hardluck story could not move him. He proclaimed loudly that we had received a penny more than our

Granting, for the sake of the argument, that we were what we represented ourselves to benamely, poor men

and brokethen here was out position: night was coming on; we had had no supper, much less dinner; and

we possessed sixpence between us. I was hungry enough to eat three sixpenn'orths of food, and so was Bert.

One thing was patent. By doing 16.3 per cent. justice to our stomachs, we would expend the sixpence, and

our stomachs would still be gnawing under 83.3 per cent. injustice. Being broke again, we could sleep under

a hedge, which was not so bad, though the cold would sap an undue portion of what we had eaten. But the

morrow was Sunday, on which we could do no work, though our silly stomachs would not knock off on that

account. Here, then, was the problem: how to get three meals on Sunday, and two on Monday (for we could

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

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 halfcrowns and florins we had brought from London.

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

Thomas Mugridge was seventyone 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 seventyone 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 seventythree. 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

They lived simply. Their wants were fewa pint of beer at the end of the day, sipped in the

semisubterranean kitchen, a weekly paper to pore over for seven nights handrunning, 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

"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

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

Fifteen children she had borne, and all were away and gone, or dead. The "baby," however, lived in

Maidstone, and she was twentyseven. When the children married they had their hands full with their own

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 Indiaand so they called them up, the living and the dead, soldier and

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

They laughed a hearty chorus. Son! Nay, grandson, just back from Indian service and a soldiertrumpeter to

the King. His brother was in the same regiment with him. And so it ran, sons and daughters, and grand sons

and daughters, worldwanderers and empirebuilders, all of them, while the old folks stayed at home and

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

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

But the Sea Wife's childbearing 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

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 lifeblood, and

underfeed, and keep it up forever. The average Mrs. Thomas Mugridge has been driven into the city, and she

is not breeding very much of anything save an anaemic and sickly progeny which cannot find enough to eat.

The strength of the Englishspeaking race today 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

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

The following illustrative cases are culled from the policecourt 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

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

Widnes Police Court. Richard Bestwick and George Hunt, charged with trespassing in search of game. Hunt

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

Glasgow Central Police Court. Before Bailie Dunlop. Edward Morrison, a lad, convicted of stealing fifteen

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

Dunfermline Sheriff Court. Before Sheriff Gillespie. John Young, a pithead worker, pleaded guilty to

assaulting Alexander Storrar by beating him about the head and body with his fists, throwing him on the

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

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

sixtytwo years of age, and who offered no resistance to the gamekeeper. Four months.

Dundee Sheriff Court. Before Hon. SheriffSubstitute R. C. Walker. John Murray, Donald Craig, and James

Parkes, charged with poaching. Craig and Parkes fined 1 pound each or fourteen days; Murray, 5 pounds or

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

Salisbury City Petty Sessions. Before the Mayor, Messrs. C. Hoskins, G. Fullford, E. Alexander, and W.

Marlow. James Moore, charged with stealing a pair of boots from outside a shop. Twenty one days.

Horncastle Police Court. Before the Rev. W. F. Massingberd, the Rev. J. Graham, and Mr. N. Lucas Calcraft.

George Brackenbury, a young labourer, convicted of what the magistrates characterised as an altogether

unprovoked and brutal assault upon James Sargeant Foster, a man over seventy years of age. Fined 1 pound

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. CulmeSeymour, and other

Eckington Police Court. Before Major L. B. Bowden, Messrs. R. Eyre, and H. A. Fowler, and Dr. Court.

Ripley Petty Sessions. Before Messrs. J. B. Wheeler, W. D. Bembridge, and M. Hooper. Vincent Allen and

George Hall, charged under the Poaching Prevention Act with being found in possession of a number of

rabbits, and John Sparham, charged with aiding and abetting them. Hall and Sparham fined 1 pound, 17s. 4d.,

and Allen 2 pounds, 17s. 4d., including costs; the former committed for fourteen days and the latter for one

Southwestern 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

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'

I stopped a moment to listen to an argument on the Mile End Waste. It was nighttime, and they were all

workmen of the better class. They had surrounded one of their number, a pleasantfaced man of thirty, and

"But 'ow about this 'ere cheap immigration?" one of them demanded. "The Jews of Whitechapel, say,

"You can't blame them," was the answer. "They're just like us, and they've got to live. Don't blame the man

"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

"And there you are again, right on the head. The union cheeks competition among the labourers, but makes it

harder where there are no unions. There's where your cheap labour of Whitechapel comes in. They're

unskilled, and have no unions, and cut each other's throats, and ours in the bargain, if we don't belong to a

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

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

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 siftingout 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

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

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

In this last instance, the statistics of London tell a terrible tale. The population of London is oneseventh 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 welltodo do

not end thus is taken into consideration, it becomes manifest that it is the fate of at least one in every three

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 thirtytwo years of age, and an inmate of the workhouse. The

I worked at Sullivan's place in Widnes, better known as the British Alkali Chemical Works. I was working in

a shed, and I had to cross the yard. It was ten o'clock at night, and there was no light about. While crossing

the yard I felt something take hold of my leg and screw it off. I became unconscious; I didn't know what

became of me for a day or two. On the following Sunday night I came to my senses, and found myself in the

hospital. I asked the nurse what was to do with my legs, and she told me both legs were off.

There was a stationary crank in the yard, let into the ground; the hole was 18 inches long, 15 inches deep, and

15 inches wide. The crank revolved in the hole three revolutions a minute. There was no fence or covering

over the hole. Since my accident they have stopped it altogether, and have covered the hole up with a piece of

sheet iron. . . . They gave me 25 pounds. They didn't reckon that as compensation; they said it was only for

charity's sake. Out of that I paid 9 pounds for a machine by which to wheel myself about.

I was labouring at the time I got my legs off. I got twentyfour 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 coldhearted. 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

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

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

When I learned that in Lesser London there were 1,292,737 people who received twentyone 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 fivea father, mother, and three children; while I have made

twentyone shillings equivalent to $5.25, though actually, twentyone 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

An analysis of one item alone will show how little room there is for waste. Bread, $1: for a family of five, for

seven days, one dollar's worth of bread will give each a daily ration of 2.8 cents; and if they eat three meals a

day, each may consume per meal 9.5 mills' worth of bread, a little less than one halfpennyworth. Now bread

is the heaviest item. They will get less of meat per mouth each meal, and still less of vegetates; while the

smaller items become too microscopic for consideration. On the other hand, these food articles are all bought

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 pocketmoney 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

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

While in London there are 1,292,737 people who receive twentyone shillings or less a week per family, it

must be remembered that we have investigated a family of five living on a twentyone shilling basis. There

are larger families, there are many families that live on less than twentyone 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

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

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

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 childlabour under fifteen, it is evident that a lessthanliving wage

I have spoken with women in Whitechapel who receive right along less than one shilling for a twelvehour

day in the coatmaking sweat shops; and with women trousers finishers who receive an average princely and

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

Conceive of an old woman, broken and dying, supporting herself and four children, and paying three shillings

per week rent, by making match boxes at 2.25d. per gross. Twelve dozen boxes for 2.25d., and, in addition,

finding her own paste and thread! She never knew a clay off, either for sickness, rest, or recreation. Each day

and every day, Sundays as well, she toiled fourteen hours. Her day's stint was seven gross, for which she

received 1s. 3.75d. In the week of ninetyeight hours' work, she made 7066 match boxes, and earned 4s.

Last year, Mr. Thomas Holmes, a policecourt missionary of note, after writing about the condition of the

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 tiemaker, 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

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

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 ayawn for you.

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

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

At one time the nations of Europe confined the undesirable Jews in city ghettos. But today 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,

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 thirtyseven of the added

The City of Dreadful Monotony, the East End is often called, especially by wellfed, 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

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

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

There are 300,000 people in London, divided into families, that live in oneroom 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

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 twentyone 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

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. GeorgesintheEast 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 twentythree,

twentyone, 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 handbarrows (one handbarrow 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

In Devonshire Place, Lisson Grove, a short while back died an old woman of seventyfive 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

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,

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

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 housesweaters 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 subsublet down to the

"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

threerelay systemthat 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 threerelay 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

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

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 housesfiftyone rooms, nearly all about 8 feet by 9 feetand 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 twentytwo 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 peopleone room containing 9 persons,

This Ghetto crowding is not through inclination, but compulsion. Nearly fifty per cent. of the workers pay

from onefourth 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 thirtyfive 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,

tworoom houses that recently rented for ten shillings are now costing twentyone shillings. East, west,

north, and south the rents are going up. When land is worth from 20,000 pounds to 30,000 pounds an acre,

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

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?

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 createda 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 lefta 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

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. Wifebeating 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

A woman of the lower Ghetto classes is as much the slave of her husband as is the Indian squaw. And I, for

one, were I a woman and had but the two choices, should prefer being a squaw. The men are economically

dependent on their masters, and the women are economically dependent on the men. The result is, the woman

gets the beating the man should give his master, and she can do nothing. There are the kiddies, and he is the

breadwinner, and she dare not send him to jail and leave herself and children to starve. Evidence to convict

can rarely be obtained when such cases come into the courts; as a rule, the trampled wife and mother is

weeping and hysterically beseeching the magistrate to let her husband off for the kiddies' sakes.

The wives become screaming harridans or, brokenspirited and doglike, lose what little decency and

selfrespect they have remaining over from their maiden days, and all sink together, unheeding, in their

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 addlepated. Frederick Harrison has always struck me as being a levelheaded, wellcontrolled man,

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 outcaststhe camp followers of the army of industryat

least onetenth 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

Ninety per cent.! The figures are appalling, yet Mr. Stopford Brooke, after drawing a frightful London

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 commonland 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 wella

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 selfrespect. The drink

demon seized upon them. Of course there was a publichouse 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

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

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

It used to be the proud boast that every Englishman's home was his castle. But today 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 betterclass 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;

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, highstrung, excitablewhen 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 dewdrops, quickvanishing before the ferocious facts of life.

As I say, the young are highstrung, nervous, excitable; the middle aged are emptyheaded, 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 rapidfire guns and the modern machinery of warfare, they will perish the

Another phrase gone glimmering, shorn of romance and tradition and all that goes to make phrases worth

keeping! For me, henceforth, "coffeehouse" 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,

But here, on this side of the world, alas and alack, the very name is a misnomer. Coffeehouse: 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 what is true of the coffee is true of the coffeehouse. Workingmen, 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

selfrespect into him. Tablecloths and napkins are unknown. A man eats in the midst of the debris left by

his predecessor, and dribbles his own scraps about him and on the floor. In rush times, in such places, I have

positively waded through the muck and mess that covered the floor, and I have managed to eat because I was

This seems to be the normal condition of the workingman, from the zest with which he addresses himself to

the board. Eating is a necessity, and there are no frills about it. He brings in with him a primitive

voraciousness, and, I am confident, carries away with him a fairly healthy appetite. When you see such a

man, on his way to work in the morning, order a pint of tea, which is no more tea than it is ambrosia, pull a

hunk of dry bread from his pocket, and wash the one down with the other, depend upon it, that man has not

the right sort of stuff in his belly, nor enough of the wrong sort of stuff, to fit him for big day's work. And

further, depend upon it, he and a thousand of his kind will not turn out the quantity or quality of work that a

thousand men will who have eaten heartily of meat and potatoes, and drunk coffee that is coffee.

As a vagrant in the "Hobo" of a California jail, I have been served better food and drink than the London

workman receives in his coffeehouses; while as an American labourer I have eaten a breakfast for

twelvepence such as the British labourer would not dream of eating. Of course, he will pay only three or four

pence for his; which is, however, as much as I paid, for I would be earning six shillings to his two or two and

a half. On the other hand, though, and in return, I would turn out an amount of work in the course of the day

that would put to shame the amount he turned out. So there are two sides to it. The man with the high

standard of living will always do more work and better than the man with the low standard of living.

There is a comparison which sailormen make between the English and American merchant services. In an

English ship, they say, it is poor grub, poor pay, and easy work; in an American ship, good grub, good pay,

and hard work. And this is applicable to the working populations of both countries. The ocean greyhounds

have to pay for speed and steam, and so does the workman. But if the workman is not able to pay for it, he

will not have the speed and steam, that is all. The proof of it is when the English workman comes to America.

He will lay more bricks in New York than he will in London, still more bricks in St. Louis, and still more

bricks when he gets to San Francisco. {3} His standard of living has been rising all the time.

Early in the morning, along the streets frequented by workmen on the way to work, many women sit on the

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

coffeehouses. 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 hardheaded common sense if they

Not only is the worker poorly fed, but he is filthily fed. I have stood outside a butchershop and watched a

horde of speculative housewives turning over the trimmings and scraps and shreds of beef and

muttondogmeat 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 offensivelooking bit of meat, and followed it through the clutches of over twenty

women, till it fell to the lot of a timidappearing 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,

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 fruitin 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 coffeehouses, which is a fair criterion, they never know in all their lives what tea, coffee,

or cocoa tastes like. The slops and waterwitcheries 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 coffeehouse not far from Jubilee Street on the Mile End

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

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

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

"Hi sold a box o' matches! Yus," she confirmed, if anything with greater and more explosive glee. "Hi sold a

"Blimey, I'd like to do something for the old girl, that I would, but this is the first I've 'ad tody," the young

fellow alongside volunteered to me. "An' I only 'ave this because I 'appened to make an odd shilling washin'

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

One meets with all sorts of adventures in coffeehouse, 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

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

She sniffed superciliously and gave me the change in small silver, and I had my revenge by biting and ringing

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

I never had much talent for repartee, but she knocked silly what little I had, and I gulped down my tea a

While 300,000 people of London live in oneroom tenements, and 900,000 are illegally and viciously

housed, 38,000 more are registered as living in common lodginghousesknown in the vernacular as

"dosshouses." There are many kinds of dosshouses, 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 middleclass 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 willynilly, 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

This must not be considered a sweeping condemnation of the big private and municipal lodginghouses and

workingmen's homes. Far from it. They have remedied many of the atrocities attendant upon the

irresponsible small dosshouses, 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 dwellingplace of a man should be

The little private dosshouses, 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

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 overclean 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 illlighted 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

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 smokingroom. Here, a couple of small billiard tables and several checkerboards

were being used by young workingmen, 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

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,

To get an adequate idea of a floor filled with cabins, you have merely to magnify a layer of the pasteboard

pigeonholes of an egg crate till each pigeonhole 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 pigeonholes, 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, sweetheart, ballet dancers, or bulldogs, as his heart listethin 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 workingman's home.

They go to the workhouse. But I looked at the young men, scores of them, and they were not badlooking

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,

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

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

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

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, twentyone per cent. of the whole population are driven to the parish for relief. Between

being driven to the parish for relief and being an outandout 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

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 RegistrarGeneral's Report for 1886, the following figures are

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.

And in today's paper I read of a clerk, thirtyfive years of age and an inmate of a London workhouse,

brought before a magistrate for nonperformance 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

Old age, of course, makes pauperism. And then there is the accident, the thing happening, the death or

disablement of the husband, father, and breadwinner. Here is a man, with a wife and three children, living

on the ticklish security of twenty shillings per weekand 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 sweatshops for work which she can perform in the vile den possible to her reduced income.

But with the sweatshops, 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 semistarvation, till

To show that this mother, with her three children to support, cannot compete in the sweating industries, I

A father indignantly writes that his daughter and a girl companion receive 8.5d. per gross for making boxes.

They made each day four gross. Their expenses were 8d. for car fare, 2d. for stamps, 2.5d. for glue, and 1d.

for string, so that all they earned between them was 1s. 9d., or a daily wage each of 10.5d.

In the second ewe, before the Luton Guardians a few days ago, an old woman of seventytwo 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 themnamely, 2.25d. each. For that price she had to provide plait trimmings and

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,

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 fiftyfive 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 fiftyfive 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, twentyfive die

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

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 windowboxes; but these gifts could

not be made in courts such as these, AS FLOWERS AND PLANTS WERE SUSCEPTIBLE TO THE

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

Percentage of Population Deathrate Overcrowded per 1000 St. George's West 10 13.2 St. George's South 35

Then there are the "dangerous trades," in which countless workers are employed. Their hold on life is indeed

precariousfar, far more precarious than the hold of the twentiethcentury 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 splendidlybuilt men to be

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

Steel dust, stone dust, clay dust, alkali dust, fluff dust, fibre dustall these things kill, and they are more

deadly than machine guns and pompoms. Worst of all is the lead dust in the whitelead trades. Here is a

description of the typical dissolution of a young, healthy, welldeveloped girl who goes to work in a

Here, after a varying degree of exposure, she becomes anaemic. It may be that her gums show a very faint

blue line, or perchance her teeth and gums are perfectly sound, and no blue line is discernible. Coincidently

with the anaemia she has been getting thinner, but so gradually as scarcely to impress itself upon her or her

friends. Sickness, however, ensues, and headaches, growing in intensity, are developed. These are frequently

attended by obscuration of vision or temporary blindness. Such a girl passes into what appears to her friends

and medical adviser as ordinary hysteria. This gradually deepens without warning, until she is suddenly

seized with a convulsion, beginning in one half of the face, then involving the arm, next the leg of the same

side of the body, until the convulsion, violent and purely epileptic form in character, becomes universal. This

is attended by loss of consciousness, out of which she passes into a series of convulsions, gradually

increasing in severity, in one of which she diesor 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.

Charlotte Rafferty, a fine, wellgrown young woman with a splendid constitutionwho had never had a

day's illness in her lifebecame a whitelead 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 Tolera girl of seventeen, who had never had a fit in her lifethree times became ill, and had to

leave off work in the factory. Before she was nineteen she showed symptoms of lead poisoninghad fits,

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 twentyfive, 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 whitelead worker enter

the world, as a rule, only to die from the convulsions of lead poisoningthey are either born prematurely, or

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

To the young workingman or workingwoman, 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.

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 attemptatsuicide case in a police court excites no more interest than an ordinary "drunk," and is

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 courtroom, that I was half

bewildered by the amazing despatch with which drunks, disorderlies, vagrants, brawlers, wifebeaters,

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

motherlylooking woman bobbed up in the witnessbox and began her testimony. Wife of the Britannia

lockkeeper, 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 lockkeeper'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 courtroom laughed; but all I

could see was a boy on the threshold of life, passionately crawling to muddy death, and there was no laughter

A man was now in the witnessbox, 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,

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

"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

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

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 fiftytwo. 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

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

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 fiftytwo years' service in

the world has earned, with nothing but the horrors of the workhouse before her, was very rational and

levelheaded 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 fiftytwo 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

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

Timothy Warner, thirtytwo, was remanded for a similar offence. He jumped off Limehouse Pier, and when

A decentlooking young woman, named Ellen Gray, was remanded on a charge of attempting to commit

suicide. About halfpast 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

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

"He is a goodlooking 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

His wife, Hannah Cavilla, was a big, handsome, lighthearted 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

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

The thing had happened. He had fought, and starved, and suffered for eighteen months. He got up one

September morning, early. He opened his pocketknife. He cut the throat of his wife, Hannah Cavilla, aged

thirtythree. He cut the throat of his firstborn, 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 youngestborn, 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

goodlooking man, with a mass of black hair, dark, expressive eyes, delicately chiselled nose and chin, and

There is one beautiful sight in the East End, and only one, and it is the children dancing in the street when the

organgrinder goes his round. It is fascinating to watch them, the newborn, 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

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 grownups.

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 organgrinder. 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 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,

As to the manner in which this is done, I have in previous chapters described it at length; here let Professor

"Any one who is acquainted with the state of the population of all great industrial centres, whether in this or

other countries, is aware that amidst a large and increasing body of that population there reigns supreme . . .

that condition which the French call la misere, a word for which I do not think there is any exact English

equivalent. It is a condition in which the food, warmth, and clothing which are necessary for the mere

maintenance of the functions of the body in their normal state cannot be obtained; in which men, women, and

children are forced to crowd into dens wherein decency is abolished, and the most ordinary conditions of

healthful existence are impossible of attainment; in which the pleasures within reach are reduced to brutality

and drunkenness; in which the pains accumulate at compound interest in the shape of starvation, disease,

stunted development, and moral degradation; in which the prospect of even steady and honest industry is a

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

"Dull despair and misery Lie about them from their birth; Ugly curses, uglier mirth, Are their earliest

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 roomissue 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 lodginghouses, 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

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,

"Why didn't you ask the woman for food?" the magistrate demanded, in a hurt sort of tone. "She would surely

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,

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

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 neverending streets, expecting always to see it byandby; until they sat

down at last, faint and despairing, and were rescued by a kind woman who brought them back. Evidently they

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, bythebye. 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

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 halfcrown a week he paid for it.

The magistrate discharged the two juvenile offenders and warned the father that he was bringing his children

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

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

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, brassbuttoned keepers

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, gutterwolves 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,

illshaped, and squat. There were no swelling muscles, no abundant thews and widespreading shoulders.

They exhibited, rather, an elemental economy of nature, such as the cavemen 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

halfsovereign, 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

The dear soft people of the golden theatres and wondermansions 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 ablebodied 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, blearyeyed, and towsled, leering and gibbering,

overspilling with foulness and corruption, and, gone in debauch, sprawling across benches and bars,

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

deathswomen, 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, whitefaced and sickly, homeless, the pair of them, who

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 sweatshop 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

The unfit and the unneeded! The miserable and despised and forgotten, dying in the social shambles. The

progeny of prostitutionof 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 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

"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

"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

"Not when they hold together," he replied. "Whenever you come along in the East End and see a child of

from eight to twelve, goodsized, welldeveloped, and healthylooking, 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,

He pulled down his sleeve, a concrete instance of where chronic semistarvation 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 poorlaw relief in the United Kingdom. One in

eleven of the whole workingclass receive poorlaw relief in the course of the year; 37,500,000 people

receive less than 12 pounds per month, per family; and a constant army of 8,000,000 lives on the border of

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

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

Breakfast0.75 pint of skilly and dry bread. Dinner 3 oz. meat. 1 slice of bread. 0.5 lb. potatoes. Supper

Oscar Wilde, God rest his soul, voices the cry of the prison child, which, in varying degree, is the cry of the

"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 halfpast seven. At twelve o'clock

it gets dinner, composed of a tin of coarse Indian meal stirabout (skilly), and at halfpast 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 dimlit 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

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

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

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

But it is not alone the Ghettodweller, 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 rentfree 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 (halftin condensed) 0 3.25 Coal 1

6 Beer none Tobacco none Insurance ("Prudential") 0 3 Labourers' Union 0 1 Wood, tools, dispensary, 0 6

The guardians of the workhouse in the above Union pride themselves on their rigid economy. It costs per

If the labourer whose budget has been described should quit his toil and go into the workhouse, he would cost

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 peoplebuying, cooking, and serving wholesalethan it is to cater for a small number of

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 rentfree cottage, but a cottage for which it paid three

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

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 onefourth of the dwellers are condemned to a

poverty which destroys them physically and spiritually; that fully onefourth 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

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 workhousethe 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

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 publichouse 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 publichouse. No disgrace or shame attaches to it, nor

I remember a girl in a coffeehouse 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 preeminent respectability and

discretion. Mrs. Grundy drew the line at spirits, but allowed that it was quite proper for a clean young girl to

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. Illfed, 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

As homelife vanishes, the publichouse 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 homelife flee to the

bright and clattering publichouse in a vain attempt to express their gregariousness. And when a family is

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 houseworkstill in the same room. Here she

washes the clothes, filling the pent space with soapsuds and the smell of dirty clothes, and overhead she

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 fiftyfive 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

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 publichouse 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

Then there are the insecurity of happiness, the precariousness of existence, the wellfounded fear of the

futurepotent factors in driving people to drink. Wretchedness squirms for alleviation, and in the

publichouse 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

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

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

publiccharity 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

today 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

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 violetmakers than they can cope with are being born right along? This

violetmaker 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

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 incomein 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 shortsighted thriftpreachers 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 childcatcher. 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 fortynine out of fifty of

Every twentyfour 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 gutterfolk from their pestilential environment, and gives them a healthy, wholesome

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

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

Let us see. In Alaska, along the banks of the Yukon River, near its mouth, live the Innuit folk. They are a

very primitive people, manifesting but mere glimmering adumbrations of that tremendous artifice,

Civilisation. Their capital amounts possibly to 2 pounds per head. They hunt and fish for their food with

boneheaded spews and arrows. They never suffer from lack of shelter. Their clothes, largely made from the

skins of animals, are warm. They always have fuel for their fires, likewise timber for their houses, which they

build partly underground, and in which they lie snugly during the periods of intense cold. In the summer they

live in tents, open to every breeze and cool. They are healthy, and strong, and happy. Their one problem is

food. They have their times of plenty and times of famine. In good times they feast; in bad times they die of

starvation. But starvation, as a chronic condition, present with a large number of them all the time, is a thing

In the United Kingdom, on the rim of the Western Ocean, live the English folk. They are a consummately

civilised people. Their capital amounts to at least 300 pounds per head. They gain their food, not by hunting

and fishing, but by toil at colossal artifices. For the most part, they suffer from lack of shelter. The greater

number of them are vilely housed, do not have enough fuel to keep them warm, and are insufficiently clothed.

A constant number never have any houses at all, and sleep shelterless under the stars. Many are to be found,

winter and summer, shivering on the streets in their rags. They have good times and bad. In good times most

of them manage to get enough to eat, in bad times they die of starvation. They are dying now, they were

dying yesterday and last year, they will die tomorrow and next year, of starvation; for they, unlike the

Innuit, suffer from a chronic condition of starvation. There are 40,000,000 of the English folk, and 939 out of

every 1000 of them die in poverty, while a constant army of 8,000,000 struggles on the ragged edge of

starvation. Further, each babe that is born, is born in debt to the sum of 22 pounds. This is because of an

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

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

There can be one answer onlyMISMANAGEMENT. 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 deathblow to striving and progress.

One other alternative, and one other only, presents itself. CIVILISATION MUST BE COMPELLED TO

BETTER THE LOT OF THE AVERAGE MEN. This accepted, it becomes at once a question of business

management. Things profitable must be continued; things unprofitable must be eliminated. Either the Empire

is a profit to England, or it is a loss. If it is a loss, it must be done away with. If it is a profit, it must be

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

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

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 lifeblood. It

has enfeebled the stayathome 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

A vast empire is foundering on the hands of this incapable management. And by empire is meant the political

machinery which holds together the Englishspeaking 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

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 wornout,

pastyfaced 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 workedout 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

There can be no mistake. Civilisation has increased man's producing power an hundredfold, 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 today as he lived in the stone

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

{3} The San Francisco bricklayer receives twenty shillings per day, and at present is on strike for