All these were years ago little red-coloured, pulpy infants, capable
of being kneaded, baked, into any social form you chose.--CARLYLE.
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 women.
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, brass-buttoned keepers kept order among them when they snarled
too fiercely.
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, gutter-wolves 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, ill-shaped, and squat. There were no swelling muscles, no abundant thews and
wide-spreading shoulders. They exhibited, rather, an elemental economy
of nature, such as the cave-men 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 half-sovereign, 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 live and prey in the jungle.
The dear soft people of the golden theatres and wonder-mansions 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 able-bodied 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, bleary-eyed, and towsled, leering and gibbering, overspilling
with foulness and corruption, and, gone in debauch, sprawling across
benches and bars, unspeakably repulsive, fearful to look upon.
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 deaths--women, 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, white-faced and sickly, homeless, the pair of
them, who sat upon the pavement with their backs against a railing and
watched it all.
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
sweat-shop 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 children because he cannot find work enough to
give them food and shelter.
The unfit and the unneeded! The miserable and despised and forgotten,
dying in the social shambles. The progeny of prostitution--of 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 squatting-place, than to be a people of the machine
and the Abyss.