Those on the Edge.
I assure you I found nothing worse, nothing more degrading, nothing so hopeless, nothing nearly so intolerably dull and miserable as the life I left behind me in the East End of London.
-HUXLEY.
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 reigned,- sometimes whole rows of houses in little out-of-the-way 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, relative to the wretchedness that encompasses them, they are well off.
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, that the less than little they get cannot save them.
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 labor his father did, he is well on the way to the shambles at the bottom of the Abyss.
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 to London Town to destroy and be destroyed.
Leaving out the disease germs that fill the air of the East End, consider but the one item of smoke.Sir William Thistleton-Dyer, 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 twenty-four 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 crystallized 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 workmen through all the days and nights of their lives.
It is incontrovertible that the children grow up into rotten adults, without virility or stamina, a-weak-kneed, narrow-chested, 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 there are, roughly, 12,000country-born as against 3,000 London-born.
So one is forced to conclude that the Abyss is literally a huge man-killing machine, and when I pass along the little out-of-the-way streets with the full-bellied 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 even three generations.
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 lived.
