"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.