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 14 shillings per week.She gets her living by letting the house to lodgers and doing a day's washing or charing.That woman, with tears in her eyes, told me that the landlord had increased the rent from 14 shillings to 18 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 vigor and stature manages to grow up, he is haled forthwith into the army.Asoldier, 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 the 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 overwrought 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 of 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 the Rev.Stopford Brooke, after drawing a frightful London picture, finds himself compelled to multiply it by half a million.Here it is:
