The mean streets merely look mean from the outside, but inside the walls are to be found squalor, misery, and tragedy. While the following tragedy may be revolting to read, it must not be forgotten that the existence of it is far more revolting. In Devonshire Place, Lisson Grove, a short while back died an old woman of seventy-five years of age. At the inquest the coroner’s officer stated that all he found in the room was a lot of old rags covered with vermin. He had got himself smothered with the vermin. The room was in a shocking condition, and he had never seen anything like it. Everything was absolutely covered with vermin.’
The doctor said: ‘He found deceased lying across the fender on her back. She had one garment and her stockings on. The body was quite alive with vermin, and all the clothes in the room were absolutely gray with insects. Deceased was very badly nourished and was very emaciated. She had extensive sores on her legs, and her stockings were adherent to those sores. The sores were the result of vermin.’
A man present at the inquest wrote; ‘I had the evil fortune to see the body of the unfortunate woman as it lay in the mortuary; and even now the memory of that gruesome sight makes me shudder. There she lay in the mortuary shell, so starved and emaciated that she was a mere bundle of skin and bones. Her hair, which was matted with filth, was simply a nest of vermin. Over her bony chest leaped and rolled hundreds, thousands, myriads of vermin.’
If it is not good for your mother and my mother so to die, then it is not good for this woman, whosoever’s mother she might be, so to die.
Bishop Wilkinson, who has lived in Zululand, recently said, ‘No headman of an African village would allow such a promiscuous mixing of young men and women, boys and girls.’ He had reference to the children of the overcrowded folk, who at five have nothing to learn and much to unlearn which they will never unlearn.
It is notorious that here in the Ghetto the houses of the poor are greater profit earners than the mansions of the rich. Not only does the poor worker have to live like a beast, but he pays proportionately more for it than does the rich man for his spacious comfort. A class of house-sweaters has been made possible by the competition of the poor for houses. There are more people than there is room, and numbers are in the workhouse because they cannot find shelter elsewhere. Not only are houses let, but they are sublet, and sub-sublet down to the very rooms.
‘A part of a room to let.’ This notice was posted a short while ago in a window not five minutes’ walk from St. James’s Hall. The Rev. Hugh Price Hughes is authority for the statement that beds are let on the three-relay system-that is, three tenants to a bed, each occupying it eight hours, so that it never grows cold; while the floor space underneath the bed is likewise let on the three-relay system. Health officers are not at all unused to finding such cases as the following; in one room having a cubic capacity of 1000 feet, three adult females in the bed, and two adult females under the bed; and in one room of 1650 cubic feet, one adult male and two children in the bed, and two adult females under the bed.
Here is a typical example of a room on the more respectable two-relay system. It is occupied in the daytime by a young woman employed all night in a hotel. At seven o’clock in the evening she vacates the room, and a bricklayer’s laborer comes in. At seven in the morning he vacates, and goes to his work, at which time she returns from hers.
The Rev. W. N. Davies, rector of Spitalfields, took a census of some of the alleys in his parish. He says:
In one alley there are 10 houses-51 rooms, nearly all about 8 feet by 9 feet-and 254 people. In six instances only do 2 people occupy one room; and in others the number varied from 3 to 9. In another court with 6 houses and 22 rooms were 84 people-again, 6, 7, 8, and 9 being the number living in one room, in several instances. In one house with 8 rooms are 45 people-one room containing 9 persons, one 8, two 7, and another 6.
This Ghetto crowding is not through inclination, but compulsion. Nearly fifty per cent of the workers pay from one-fourth to one-half of their earnings for rent. The average rent in the larger part of the East End is from $1.00 to $1.50 per week for one room, while skilled mechanics, earning $8.75 per week, are forced to part with $3.75 of it for two or three pokey little dens, in which they strive desperately to obtain some semblance of home life. And rents are going up all the time. In one street in Stepney the increase in only two years has been from $3.25 to $4.50; in another street from $2.75 to $4; and in another street, from $2.75 to $3.75; while in Whitechapel, two-room houses that recently rented for $2.50 are now costing $5.25. East, west, north, and south, the rents are going up. When land is worth from $100,000 to $150,000 an acre, some one must pay the landlord.
Mr. W. C. Steadman, in the House of Commons, in a speech concerning his constituency in Stepney, related the following:
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. A soldier, 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.