CHAPTER XXIII--THE CHILDREN
"Where home is a hovel, and dull we grovel,
Forgetting the world is fair."
There is one beautiful sight in the East End, and only one, and it
is the children dancing in the street when the organ-grinder goes
his round. It is fascinating to watch them, the new-born, the next
generation, swaying and stepping, with pretty little mimicries and
graceful inventions all their own, with muscles that move swiftly
and easily, and bodies that leap airily, weaving rhythms never
taught in dancing school.
I have talked with these children, here, there, and everywhere, and
they struck me as being bright as other children, and in many ways
even brighter. They have most active little imaginations. Their
capacity for projecting themselves into the realm of romance and
fantasy is remarkable. A joyous life is romping in their blood.
They delight in music, and motion, and colour, and very often they
betray a startling beauty of face and form under their filth and
rags.
But there is a Pied Piper of London Town who steals them all away.
They disappear. One never sees them again, or anything that
suggests them. You may look for them in vain amongst the generation
of grown-ups. Here you will find stunted forms, ugly faces, and
blunt and stolid minds. Grace, beauty, imagination, all the
resiliency of mind and muscle, are gone. Sometimes, however, you
may see a woman, not necessarily old, but twisted and deformed out
of all womanhood, bloated and drunken, lift her draggled skirts and
execute a few grotesque and lumbering steps upon the pavement. It
is a hint that she was once one of those children who danced to the
organ-grinder. Those grotesque and lumbering steps are all that is
left of the promise of childhood. In the befogged recesses of her
brain has arisen a fleeting memory that she was once a girl. The
crowd closes in. Little girls are dancing beside her, about her,
with all the pretty graces she dimly recollects, but can no more
than parody with her body. Then she pants for breath, exhausted,
and stumbles out through the circle. But the little girls dance on.
The children of the Ghetto possess all the qualities which make for
noble manhood and womanhood; but the Ghetto itself, like an
infuriated tigress turning on its young, turns upon and destroys all
these qualities, blots out the light and laughter, and moulds those
it does not kill into sodden and forlorn creatures, uncouth,
degraded, and wretched below the beasts of the field.
As to the manner in which this is done, I have in previous chapters
described it at length; here let Professor Huxley describe it in
brief:-
"Any one who is acquainted with the state of the population of all
great industrial centres, whether in this or other countries, is
aware that amidst a large and increasing body of that population
there reigns supreme . . . that condition which the French call la
misere, a word for which I do not think there is any exact English
equivalent. It is a condition in which the food, warmth, and
clothing which are necessary for the mere maintenance of the
functions of the body in their normal state cannot be obtained; in
which men, women, and children are forced to crowd into dens wherein
decency is abolished, and the most ordinary conditions of healthful
existence are impossible of attainment; in which the pleasures
within reach are reduced to brutality and drunkenness; in which the
pains accumulate at compound interest in the shape of starvation,
disease, stunted development, and moral degradation; in which the
prospect of even steady and honest industry is a life of
unsuccessful battling with hunger, rounded by a pauper's grave."
In such conditions, the outlook for children is hopeless. They die
like flies, and those that survive, survive because they possess
excessive vitality and a capacity of adaptation to the degradation
with which they are surrounded. They have no home life. In the
dens and lairs in which they live they are exposed to all that is
obscene and indecent. And as their minds are made rotten, so are
their bodies made rotten by bad sanitation, overcrowding, and
underfeeding. When a father and mother live with three or four
children in a room where the children take turn about in sitting up
to drive the rats away from the sleepers, when those children never
have enough to eat and are preyed upon and made miserable and weak
by swarming vermin, the sort of men and women the survivors will
make can readily be imagined.
"Dull despair and misery
Lie about them from their birth;
Ugly curses, uglier mirth,
Are their earliest lullaby."
A man and a woman marry and set up housekeeping in one room. Their
income does not increase with the years, though their family does,
and the man is exceedingly lucky if he can keep his health and his
job. A baby comes, and then another. This means that more room
should be obtained; but these little mouths and bodies mean
additional expense and make it absolutely impossible to get more
spacious quarters. More babies come. There is not room in which to
turn around. The youngsters run the streets, and by the time they
are twelve or fourteen the room-issue comes to a head, and out they
go on the streets for good. The boy, if he be lucky, can manage to
make the common lodging-houses, and he may have any one of several
ends. But the girl of fourteen or fifteen, forced in this manner to
leave the one room called home, and able to earn at the best a
paltry five or six shillings per week, can have but one end. And
the bitter end of that one end is such as that of the woman whose
body the police found this morning in a doorway in Dorset Street,
Whitechapel. Homeless, shelterless, sick, with no one with her in
her last hour, she had died in the night of exposure. She was
sixty-two years old and a match vendor. She died as a wild animal
dies.
Fresh in my mind is the picture of a boy in the dock of an East End
police court. His head was barely visible above the railing. He
was being proved guilty of stealing two shillings from a woman,
which he had spent, not for candy and cakes and a good time, but for
food.
"Why didn't you ask the woman for food?" the magistrate demanded, in
a hurt sort of tone. "She would surely have given you something to
eat."
"If I 'ad arsked 'er, I'd got locked up for beggin'," was the boy's
reply.
The magistrate knitted his brows and accepted the rebuke. Nobody
knew the boy, nor his father or mother. He was without beginning or
antecedent, a waif, a stray, a young cub seeking his food in the
jungle of empire, preying upon the weak and being preyed upon by the
strong.
The people who try to help, who gather up the Ghetto children and
send them away on a day's outing to the country, believe that not
very many children reach the age of ten without having had at least
one day there. Of this, a writer says: "The mental change caused
by one day so spent must not be undervalued. Whatever the
circumstances, the children learn the meaning of fields and woods,
so that descriptions of country scenery in the books they read,
which before conveyed no impression, become now intelligible."
One day in the fields and woods, if they are lucky enough to be
picked up by the people who try to help! And they are being born
faster every day than they can be carted off to the fields and woods
for the one day in their lives. One day! In all their lives, one
day! And for the rest of the days, as the boy told a certain
bishop, "At ten we 'ops the wag; at thirteen we nicks things; an' at
sixteen we bashes the copper." Which is to say, at ten they play
truant, at thirteen steal, and at sixteen are sufficiently developed
hooligans to smash the policemen.
The Rev. J. Cartmel Robinson tells of a boy and girl of his parish
who set out to walk to the forest. They walked and walked through
the never-ending streets, expecting always to see it by-and-by;
until they sat down at last, faint and despairing, and were rescued
by a kind woman who brought them back. Evidently they had been
overlooked by the people who try to help.
The same gentleman is authority for the statement that in a street
in Hoxton (a district of the vast East End), over seven hundred
children, between five and thirteen years, live in eighty small
houses. And he adds: "It is because London has largely shut her
children in a maze of streets and houses and robbed them of their
rightful inheritance in sky and field and brook, that they grow up
to be men and women physically unfit."
He tells of a member of his congregation who let a basement room to
a married couple. "They said they had two children; when they got
possession it turned out that they had four. After a while a fifth
appeared, and the landlord gave them notice to quit. They paid no
attention to it. Then the sanitary inspector who has to wink at the
law so often, came in and threatened my friend with legal
proceedings. He pleaded that he could not get them out. They
pleaded that nobody would have them with so many children at a
rental within their means, which is one of the commonest complaints
of the poor, by-the-bye. What was to be done? The landlord was
between two millstones. Finally he applied to the magistrate, who
sent up an officer to inquire into the case. Since that time about
twenty days have elapsed, and nothing has yet been done. Is this a
singular case? By no means; it is quite common."
Last week the police raided a disorderly house. In one room were
found two young children. They were arrested and charged with being
inmates the same as the women had been. Their father appeared at
the trial. He stated that himself and wife and two older children,
besides the two in the dock, occupied that room; he stated also that
he occupied it because he could get no other room for the half-crown
a week he paid for it. The magistrate discharged the two juvenile
offenders and warned the father that he was bringing his children up
unhealthily.
But there is no need further to multiply instances. In London the
slaughter of the innocents goes on on a scale more stupendous than
any before in the history of the world. And equally stupendous is
the callousness of the people who believe in Christ, acknowledge
God, and go to church regularly on Sunday. For the rest of the week
they riot about on the rents and profits which come to them from the
East End stained with the blood of the children. Also, at times, so
peculiarly are they made, they will take half a million of these
rents and profits and send it away to educate the black boys of the
Soudan.
