CHAPTER XIX--THE GHETTO
Is it well that while we range with Science, glorying in the time,
City children soak and blacken soul and sense in city slime?
There among the gloomy alleys Progress halts on palsied feet;
Crime and hunger cast out maidens by the thousand on the street;
There the master scrimps his haggard seamstress of her daily bread;
There the single sordid attic holds the living and the dead;
There the smouldering fire of fever creeps across the rotted floor,
And the crowded couch of incest, in the warrens of the poor.
At one time the nations of Europe confined the undesirable Jews in
city ghettos. But to-day the dominant economic class, by less
arbitrary but none the less rigorous methods, has confined the
undesirable yet necessary workers into ghettos of remarkable
meanness and vastness. East London is such a ghetto, where the rich
and the powerful do not dwell, and the traveller cometh not, and
where two million workers swarm, procreate, and die.
It must not be supposed that all the workers of London are crowded
into the East End, but the tide is setting strongly in that
direction. The poor quarters of the city proper are constantly
being destroyed, and the main stream of the unhoused is toward the
east. In the last twelve years, one district, "London over the
Border," as it is called, which lies well beyond Aldgate,
Whitechapel, and Mile End, has increased 260,000, or over sixty per
cent. The churches in this district, by the way, can seat but one
in every thirty-seven of the added population.
The City of Dreadful Monotony, the East End is often called,
especially by well-fed, optimistic sightseers, who look over the
surface of things and are merely shocked by the intolerable sameness
and meanness of it all. If the East End is worthy of no worse title
than The City of Dreadful Monotony, and if working people are
unworthy of variety and beauty and surprise, it would not be such a
bad place in which to live. But the East End does merit a worse
title. It should be called The City of Degradation.
While it is not a city of slums, as some people imagine, it may well
be said to be one gigantic slum. From the standpoint of simple
decency and clean manhood and womanhood, any mean street, of all its
mean streets, is a slum. Where sights and sounds abound which
neither you nor I would care to have our children see and hear is a
place where no man's children should live, and see, and hear. Where
you and I would not care to have our wives pass their lives is a
place where no other man's wife should have to pass her life. For
here, in the East End, the obscenities and brute vulgarities of life
are rampant. There is no privacy. The bad corrupts the good, and
all fester together. Innocent childhood is sweet and beautiful:
but in East London innocence is a fleeting thing, and you must catch
them before they crawl out of the cradle, or you will find the very
babes as unholily wise as you.
The application of the Golden Rule determines that East London is an
unfit place in which to live. Where you would not have your own
babe live, and develop, and gather to itself knowledge of life and
the things of life, is not a fit place for the babes of other men to
live, and develop, and gather to themselves knowledge of life and
the things of life. It is a simple thing, this Golden Rule, and all
that is required. Political economy and the survival of the fittest
can go hang if they say otherwise. What is not good enough for you
is not good enough for other men, and there's no more to be said.
There are 300,000 people in London, divided into families, that live
in one-room tenements. Far, far more live in two and three rooms
and are as badly crowded, regardless of sex, as those that live in
one room. The law demands 400 cubic feet of space for each person.
In army barracks each soldier is allowed 600 cubic feet. Professor
Huxley, at one time himself a medical officer in East London, always
held that each person should have 800 cubic feet of space, and that
it should be well ventilated with pure air. Yet in London there are
900,000 people living in less than the 400 cubic feet prescribed by
the law.
Mr. Charles Booth, who engaged in a systematic work of years in
charting and classifying the toiling city population, estimates that
there are 1,800,000 people in London who are POOR and VERY POOR. It
is of interest to mark what he terms poor. By POOR he means
families which have a total weekly income of from eighteen to
twenty-one shillings. The VERY POOR fall greatly below this
standard.
The workers, as a class, are being more and more segregated by their
economic masters; and this process, with its jamming and
overcrowding, tends not so much toward immorality as unmorality.
Here is an extract from a recent meeting of the London County
Council, terse and bald, but with a wealth of horror to be read
between the lines:-
Mr. Bruce asked the Chairman of the Public Health Committee whether
his attention had been called to a number of cases of serious
overcrowding in the East End. In St. Georges-in-the-East a man and
his wife and their family of eight occupied one small room. This
family consisted of five daughters, aged twenty, seventeen, eight,
four, and an infant; and three sons, aged fifteen, thirteen, and
twelve. In Whitechapel a man and his wife and their three
daughters, aged sixteen, eight, and four, and two sons, aged ten and
twelve years, occupied a smaller room. In Bethnal Green a man and
his wife, with four sons, aged twenty-three, twenty-one, nineteen,
and sixteen, and two daughters, aged fourteen and seven, were also
found in one room. He asked whether it was not the duty of the
various local authorities to prevent such serious overcrowding.
But with 900,000 people actually living under illegal conditions,
the authorities have their hands full. When the overcrowded folk
are ejected they stray off into some other hole; and, as they move
their belongings by night, on hand-barrows (one hand-barrow
accommodating the entire household goods and the sleeping children),
it is next to impossible to keep track of them. If the Public
Health Act of 1891 were suddenly and completely enforced, 900,000
people would receive notice to clear out of their houses and go on
to the streets, and 500,000 rooms would have to be built before they
were all legally housed again.
The mean streets merely look mean from the outside, but inside the
walls are to be found squalor, misery, and tragedy. While the
following tragedy may be revolting to read, it must not be forgotten
that the existence of it is far more revolting.
In Devonshire Place, Lisson Grove, a short while back died an old
woman of seventy-five years of age. At the inquest the coroner's
officer stated that "all he found in the room was a lot of old rags
covered with vermin. He had got himself smothered with the vermin.
The room was in a shocking condition, and he had never seen anything
like it. Everything was absolutely covered with vermin."
The doctor said: "He found deceased lying across the fender on her
back. She had one garment and her stockings on. The body was quite
alive with vermin, and all the clothes in the room were absolutely
grey with insects. Deceased was very badly nourished and was very
emaciated. She had extensive sores on her legs, and her stockings
were adherent to those sores. The sores were the result of vermin."
A man present at the inquest wrote: "I had the evil fortune to see
the body of the unfortunate woman as it lay in the mortuary; and
even now the memory of that gruesome sight makes me shudder. There
she lay in the mortuary shell, so starved and emaciated that she was
a mere bundle of skin and bones. Her hair, which was matted with
filth, was simply a nest of vermin. Over her bony chest leaped and
rolled hundreds, thousands, myriads of vermin!"
If it is not good for your mother and my mother so to die, then it
is not good for this woman, whosoever's mother she might be, so to
die.
Bishop Wilkinson, who has lived in Zululand, recently said, "No
human of an African village would allow such a promiscuous mixing of
young men and women, boys and girls." He had reference to the
children of the overcrowded folk, who at five have nothing to learn
and much to unlearn which they will never unlearn.
It is notorious that here in the Ghetto the houses of the poor are
greater profit earners than the mansions of the rich. Not only does
the poor worker have to live like a beast, but he pays
proportionately more for it than does the rich man for his spacious
comfort. A class of house-sweaters has been made possible by the
competition of the poor for houses. There are more people than
there is room, and numbers are in the workhouse because they cannot
find shelter elsewhere. Not only are houses let, but they are
sublet, and sub-sublet down to the very rooms.
"A part of a room to let." This notice was posted a short while ago
in a window not five minutes' walk from St. James's Hall. The Rev.
Hugh Price Hughes is authority for the statement that beds are let
on the three-relay system--that is, three tenants to a bed, each
occupying it eight hours, so that it never grows cold; while the
floor space underneath the bed is likewise let on the three-relay
system. Health officers are not at all unused to finding such cases
as the following: in one room having a cubic capacity of 1000 feet,
three adult females in the bed, and two adult females under the bed;
and in one room of 1650 cubic feet, one adult male and two children
in the bed, and two adult females under the bed.
Here is a typical example of a room on the more respectable two-
relay system. It is occupied in the daytime by a young woman
employed all night in a hotel. At seven o'clock in the evening she
vacates the room, and a bricklayer's labourer comes in. At seven in
the morning he vacates, and goes to his work, at which time she
returns from hers.
The Rev. W. N. Davies, rector of Spitalfields, took a census of some
of the alleys in his parish. He says:-
In one alley there are ten houses--fifty-one rooms, nearly all about
8 feet by 9 feet--and 254 people. In six instances only do 2 people
occupy one room; and in others the number varied from 3 to 9. In
another court with six houses and twenty-two rooms were 84 people--
again 6, 7, 8, and 9 being the number living in one room, in several
instances. In one house with eight rooms are 45 people--one room
containing 9 persons, one 8, two 7, and another 6.
This Ghetto crowding is not through inclination, but compulsion.
Nearly fifty per cent. of the workers pay from one-fourth to one-
half of their earnings for rent. The average rent in the larger
part of the East End is from four to six shillings per week for one
room, while skilled mechanics, earning thirty-five shillings per
week, are forced to part with fifteen shillings of it for two or
three pokey little dens, in which they strive desperately to obtain
some semblance of home life. And rents are going up all the time.
In one street in Stepney the increase in only two years has been
from thirteen to eighteen shillings; in another street from eleven
to sixteen shillings; and in another street, from eleven to fifteen
shillings; while in Whitechapel, two-room houses that recently
rented for ten shillings are now costing twenty-one shillings.
East, west, north, and south the rents are going up. When land is
worth from 20,000 pounds to 30,000 pounds an acre, some one must pay
the landlord.
Mr. W. C. Steadman, in the House of Commons, in a speech concerning
his constituency in Stepney, related the following:-
This morning, not a hundred yards from where I am myself living, a
widow stopped me. She has six children to support, and the rent of
her house was fourteen shillings per week. She gets her living by
letting the house to lodgers and doing a day's washing or charring.
That woman, with tears in her eyes, told me that the landlord had
increased the rent from fourteen shillings to eighteen shillings.
What could the woman do? There is no accommodation in Stepney.
Every place is taken up and overcrowded.
Class supremacy can rest only on class degradation; and when the
workers are segregated in the Ghetto, they cannot escape the
consequent degradation. A short and stunted people is created--a
breed strikingly differentiated from their masters' breed, a
pavement folk, as it were lacking stamina and strength. The men
become caricatures of what physical men ought to be, and their women
and children are pale and anaemic, with eyes ringed darkly, who
stoop and slouch, and are early twisted out of all shapeliness and
beauty.
To make matters worse, the men of the Ghetto are the men who are
left--a deteriorated stock, left to undergo still further
deterioration. For a hundred and fifty years, at least, they have
been drained of their best. The strong men, the men of pluck,
initiative, and ambition, have been faring forth to the fresher and
freer portions of the globe, to make new lands and nations. Those
who are lacking, the weak of heart and head and hand, as well as the
rotten and hopeless, have remained to carry on the breed. And year
by year, in turn, the best they breed are taken from them. Wherever
a man of vigour and stature manages to grow up, he is haled
forthwith into the army. A soldier, as Bernard Shaw has said,
"ostensibly a heroic and patriotic defender of his country, is
really an unfortunate man driven by destitution to offer himself as
food for powder for the sake of regular rations, shelter, and
clothing."
This constant selection of the best from the workers has
impoverished those who are left, a sadly degraded remainder, for the
great part, which, in the Ghetto, sinks to the deepest depths. The
wine of life has been drawn off to spill itself in blood and progeny
over the rest of the earth. Those that remain are the lees, and
they are segregated and steeped in themselves. They become indecent
and bestial. When they kill, they kill with their hands, and then
stupidly surrender themselves to the executioners. There is no
splendid audacity about their transgressions. They gouge a mate
with a dull knife, or beat his head in with an iron pot, and then
sit down and wait for the police. Wife-beating is the masculine
prerogative of matrimony. They wear remarkable boots of brass and
iron, and when they have polished off the mother of their children
with a black eye or so, they knock her down and proceed to trample
her very much as a Western stallion tramples a rattlesnake.
A woman of the lower Ghetto classes is as much the slave of her
husband as is the Indian squaw. And I, for one, were I a woman and
had but the two choices, should prefer being a squaw. The men are
economically dependent on their masters, and the women are
economically dependent on the men. The result is, the woman gets
the beating the man should give his master, and she can do nothing.
There are the kiddies, and he is the breadwinner, and she dare not
send him to jail and leave herself and children to starve. Evidence
to convict can rarely be obtained when such cases come into the
courts; as a rule, the trampled wife and mother is weeping and
hysterically beseeching the magistrate to let her husband off for
the kiddies' sakes.
The wives become screaming harridans or, broken-spirited and
doglike, lose what little decency and self-respect they have
remaining over from their maiden days, and all sink together,
unheeding, in their degradation and dirt.
Sometimes I become afraid of my own generalizations upon the massed
misery of this Ghetto life, and feel that my impressions are
exaggerated, that I am too close to the picture and lack
perspective. At such moments I find it well to turn to the
testimony of other men to prove to myself that I am not becoming
over-wrought and addle-pated. Frederick Harrison has always struck
me as being a level-headed, well-controlled man, and he says:-
To me, at least, it would be enough to condemn modern society as
hardly an advance on slavery or serfdom, if the permanent condition
of industry were to be that which we behold, that ninety per cent.
of the actual producers of wealth have no home that they can call
their own beyond the end of the week; have no bit of soil, or so
much as a room that belongs to them; have nothing of value of any
kind, except as much old furniture as will go into a cart; have the
precarious chance of weekly wages, which barely suffice to keep them
in health; are housed, for the most part, in places that no man
thinks fit for his horse; are separated by so narrow a margin from
destitution that a month of bad trade, sickness, or unexpected loss
brings them face to face with hunger and pauperism . . . But below
this normal state of the average workman in town and country, there
is found the great band of destitute outcasts--the camp followers of
the army of industry--at least one-tenth the whole proletarian
population, whose normal condition is one of sickening wretchedness.
If this is to be the permanent arrangement of modern society,
civilization must be held to bring a curse on the great majority of
mankind.
Ninety per cent.! The figures are appalling, yet Mr. Stopford
Brooke, after drawing a frightful London picture, finds himself
compelled to multiply it by half a million. Here it is:-
I often used to meet, when I was curate at Kensington, families
drifting into London along the Hammersmith Road. One day there came
along a labourer and his wife, his son and two daughters. Their
family had lived for a long time on an estate in the country, and
managed, with the help of the common-land and their labour, to get
on. But the time came when the common was encroached upon, and
their labour was not needed on the estate, and they were quietly
turned out of their cottage. Where should they go? Of course to
London, where work was thought to be plentiful. They had a little
savings, and they thought they could get two decent rooms to live
in. But the inexorable land question met them in London. They
tried the decent courts for lodgings, and found that two rooms would
cost ten shillings a week. Food was dear and bad, water was bad,
and in a short time their health suffered. Work was hard to get,
and its wage was so low that they were soon in debt. They became
more ill and more despairing with the poisonous surroundings, the
darkness, and the long hours of work; and they were driven forth to
seek a cheaper lodging. They found it in a court I knew well--a
hotbed of crime and nameless horrors. In this they got a single
room at a cruel rent, and work was more difficult for them to get
now, as they came from a place of such bad repute, and they fell
into the hands of those who sweat the last drop out of man and woman
and child, for wages which are the food only of despair. And the
darkness and the dirt, the bad food and the sickness, and the want
of water was worse than before; and the crowd and the companionship
of the court robbed them of the last shreds of self-respect. The
drink demon seized upon them. Of course there was a public-house at
both ends of the court. There they fled, one and all, for shelter,
and warmth, and society, and forgetfulness. And they came out in
deeper debt, with inflamed senses and burning brains, and an
unsatisfied craving for drink they would do anything to satiate.
And in a few months the father was in prison, the wife dying, the
son a criminal, and the daughters on the street. MULTIPLY THIS BY
HALF A MILLION, AND YOU WILL BE BENEATH THE TRUTH.
No more dreary spectacle can be found on this earth than the whole
of the "awful East," with its Whitechapel, Hoxton, Spitalfields,
Bethnal Green, and Wapping to the East India Docks. The colour of
life is grey and drab. Everything is helpless, hopeless,
unrelieved, and dirty. Bath tubs are a thing totally unknown, as
mythical as the ambrosia of the gods. The people themselves are
dirty, while any attempt at cleanliness becomes howling farce, when
it is not pitiful and tragic. Strange, vagrant odours come drifting
along the greasy wind, and the rain, when it falls, is more like
grease than water from heaven. The very cobblestones are scummed
with grease.
Here lives a population as dull and unimaginative as its long grey
miles of dingy brick. Religion has virtually passed it by, and a
gross and stupid materialism reigns, fatal alike to the things of
the spirit and the finer instincts of life.
It used to be the proud boast that every Englishman's home was his
castle. But to-day it is an anachronism. The Ghetto folk have no
homes. They do not know the significance and the sacredness of home
life. Even the municipal dwellings, where live the better-class
workers, are overcrowded barracks. They have no home life. The
very language proves it. The father returning from work asks his
child in the street where her mother is; and back the answer comes,
"In the buildings."
A new race has sprung up, a street people. They pass their lives at
work and in the streets. They have dens and lairs into which to
crawl for sleeping purposes, and that is all. One cannot travesty
the word by calling such dens and lairs "homes." The traditional
silent and reserved Englishman has passed away. The pavement folk
are noisy, voluble, high-strung, excitable--when they are yet young.
As they grow older they become steeped and stupefied in beer. When
they have nothing else to do, they ruminate as a cow ruminates.
They are to be met with everywhere, standing on curbs and corners,
and staring into vacancy. Watch one of them. He will stand there,
motionless, for hours, and when you go away you will leave him still
staring into vacancy. It is most absorbing. He has no money for
beer, and his lair is only for sleeping purposes, so what else
remains for him to do? He has already solved the mysteries of
girl's love, and wife's love, and child's love, and found them
delusions and shams, vain and fleeting as dew-drops, quick-vanishing
before the ferocious facts of life.
As I say, the young are high-strung, nervous, excitable; the middle-
aged are empty-headed, stolid, and stupid. It is absurd to think
for an instant that they can compete with the workers of the New
World. Brutalised, degraded, and dull, the Ghetto folk will be
unable to render efficient service to England in the world struggle
for industrial supremacy which economists declare has already begun.
Neither as workers nor as soldiers can they come up to the mark when
England, in her need, calls upon them, her forgotten ones; and if
England be flung out of the world's industrial orbit, they will
perish like flies at the end of summer. Or, with England critically
situated, and with them made desperate as wild beasts are made
desperate, they may become a menace and go "swelling" down to the
West End to return the "slumming" the West End has done in the East.
In which case, before rapid-fire guns and the modern machinery of
warfare, they will perish the more swiftly and easily.
