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THE PEOPLE OF THE ABYSS

by Jack London






CHAPTER XX--COFFEE-HOUSES AND DOSS-HOUSES



Another phrase gone glimmering, shorn of romance and tradition and
all that goes to make phrases worth keeping! For me, henceforth,
"coffee-house" will possess anything but an agreeable connotation.
Over on the other side of the world, the mere mention of the word
was sufficient to conjure up whole crowds of its historic
frequenters, and to send trooping through my imagination endless
groups of wits and dandies, pamphleteers and bravos, and bohemians
of Grub Street.

But here, on this side of the world, alas and alack, the very name
is a misnomer. Coffee-house: a place where people drink coffee.
Not at all. You cannot obtain coffee in such a place for love or
money. True, you may call for coffee, and you will have brought you
something in a cup purporting to be coffee, and you will taste it
and be disillusioned, for coffee it certainly is not.

And what is true of the coffee is true of the coffee-house.
Working-men, in the main, frequent these places, and greasy, dirty
places they are, without one thing about them to cherish decency in
a man or put self-respect into him. Table-cloths and napkins are
unknown. A man eats in the midst of the debris left by his
predecessor, and dribbles his own scraps about him and on the floor.
In rush times, in such places, I have positively waded through the
muck and mess that covered the floor, and I have managed to eat
because I was abominably hungry and capable of eating anything.

This seems to be the normal condition of the working-man, from the
zest with which he addresses himself to the board. Eating is a
necessity, and there are no frills about it. He brings in with him
a primitive voraciousness, and, I am confident, carries away with
him a fairly healthy appetite. When you see such a man, on his way
to work in the morning, order a pint of tea, which is no more tea
than it is ambrosia, pull a hunk of dry bread from his pocket, and
wash the one down with the other, depend upon it, that man has not
the right sort of stuff in his belly, nor enough of the wrong sort
of stuff, to fit him for big day's work. And further, depend upon
it, he and a thousand of his kind will not turn out the quantity or
quality of work that a thousand men will who have eaten heartily of
meat and potatoes, and drunk coffee that is coffee.

As a vagrant in the "Hobo" of a California jail, I have been served
better food and drink than the London workman receives in his
coffee-houses; while as an American labourer I have eaten a
breakfast for twelvepence such as the British labourer would not
dream of eating. Of course, he will pay only three or four pence
for his; which is, however, as much as I paid, for I would be
earning six shillings to his two or two and a half. On the other
hand, though, and in return, I would turn out an amount of work in
the course of the day that would put to shame the amount he turned
out. So there are two sides to it. The man with the high standard
of living will always do more work and better than the man with the
low standard of living.

There is a comparison which sailormen make between the English and
American merchant services. In an English ship, they say, it is
poor grub, poor pay, and easy work; in an American ship, good grub,
good pay, and hard work. And this is applicable to the working
populations of both countries. The ocean greyhounds have to pay for
speed and steam, and so does the workman. But if the workman is not
able to pay for it, he will not have the speed and steam, that is
all. The proof of it is when the English workman comes to America.
He will lay more bricks in New York than he will in London, still
more bricks in St. Louis, and still more bricks when he gets to San
Francisco. {3} His standard of living has been rising all the time.

Early in the morning, along the streets frequented by workmen on the
way to work, many women sit on the side-walk with sacks of bread
beside them. No end of workmen purchase these, and eat them as they
walk along. They do not even wash the dry bread down with the tea
to be obtained for a penny in the coffee-houses. It is
incontestable that a man is not fit to begin his day's work on a
meal like that; and it is equally incontestable that the loss will
fall upon his employer and upon the nation. For some time, now,
statesmen have been crying, "Wake up, England!" It would show more
hard-headed common sense if they changed the tune to "Feed up,
England!"

Not only is the worker poorly fed, but he is filthily fed. I have
stood outside a butcher-shop and watched a horde of speculative
housewives turning over the trimmings and scraps and shreds of beef
and mutton--dog-meat in the States. I would not vouch for the clean
fingers of these housewives, no more than I would vouch for the
cleanliness of the single rooms in which many of them and their
families lived; yet they raked, and pawed, and scraped the mess
about in their anxiety to get the worth of their coppers. I kept my
eye on one particularly offensive-looking bit of meat, and followed
it through the clutches of over twenty women, till it fell to the
lot of a timid-appearing little woman whom the butcher bluffed into
taking it. All day long this heap of scraps was added to and taken
away from, the dust and dirt of the street falling upon it, flies
settling on it, and the dirty fingers turning it over and over.

The costers wheel loads of specked and decaying fruit around in the
barrows all day, and very often store it in their one living and
sleeping room for the night. There it is exposed to the sickness
and disease, the effluvia and vile exhalations of overcrowded and
rotten life, and next day it is carted about again to be sold.

The poor worker of the East End never knows what it is to eat good,
wholesome meat or fruit--in fact, he rarely eats meat or fruit at
all; while the skilled workman has nothing to boast of in the way of
what he eats. Judging from the coffee-houses, which is a fair
criterion, they never know in all their lives what tea, coffee, or
cocoa tastes like. The slops and water-witcheries of the coffee-
houses, varying only in sloppiness and witchery, never even
approximate or suggest what you and I are accustomed to drink as tea
and coffee.

A little incident comes to me, connected with a coffee-house not far
from Jubilee Street on the Mile End Road.

"Cawn yer let me 'ave somethin' for this, daughter? Anythin', Hi
don't mind. Hi 'aven't 'ad a bite the blessed dy, an' Hi'm that
fynt . . . "

She was an old woman, clad in decent black rags, and in her hand she
held a penny. The one she had addressed as "daughter" was a
careworn woman of forty, proprietress and waitress of the house.

I waited, possibly as anxiously as the old woman, to see how the
appeal would be received. It was four in the afternoon, and she
looked faint and sick. The woman hesitated an instant, then brought
a large plate of "stewed lamb and young peas." I was eating a plate
of it myself, and it is my judgment that the lamb was mutton and
that the peas might have been younger without being youthful.
However, the point is, the dish was sold at sixpence, and the
proprietress gave it for a penny, demonstrating anew the old truth
that the poor are the most charitable.

The old woman, profuse in her gratitude, took a seat on the other
side of the narrow table and ravenously attacked the smoking stew.
We ate steadily and silently, the pair of us, when suddenly,
explosively and most gleefully, she cried out to me, -

"Hi sold a box o' matches! Yus," she confirmed, if anything with
greater and more explosive glee. "Hi sold a box o' matches! That's
'ow Hi got the penny."

"You must be getting along in years," I suggested.

"Seventy-four yesterday," she replied, and returned with gusto to
her plate.

"Blimey, I'd like to do something for the old girl, that I would,
but this is the first I've 'ad to-dy," the young fellow alongside
volunteered to me. "An' I only 'ave this because I 'appened to make
an odd shilling washin' out, Lord lumme! I don't know 'ow many
pots."

"No work at my own tryde for six weeks," he said further, in reply
to my questions; "nothin' but odd jobs a blessed long wy between."


One meets with all sorts of adventures in coffee-house, and I shall
not soon forget a Cockney Amazon in a place near Trafalgar Square,
to whom I tendered a sovereign when paying my score. (By the way,
one is supposed to pay before he begins to eat, and if he be poorly
dressed he is compelled to pay before he eats).

The girl bit the gold piece between her teeth, rang it on the
counter, and then looked me and my rags witheringly up and down.

"Where'd you find it?" she at length demanded.

"Some mug left it on the table when he went out, eh, don't you
think?" I retorted.

"Wot's yer gyme?" she queried, looking me calmly in the eyes.

"I makes 'em," quoth I.

She sniffed superciliously and gave me the change in small silver,
and I had my revenge by biting and ringing every piece of it.

"I'll give you a ha'penny for another lump of sugar in the tea," I
said.

"I'll see you in 'ell first," came the retort courteous. Also, she
amplified the retort courteous in divers vivid and unprintable ways.

I never had much talent for repartee, but she knocked silly what
little I had, and I gulped down my tea a beaten man, while she
gloated after me even as I passed out to the street.

While 300,000 people of London live in one-room tenements, and
900,000 are illegally and viciously housed, 38,000 more are
registered as living in common lodging-houses--known in the
vernacular as "doss-houses." There are many kinds of doss-houses,
but in one thing they are all alike, from the filthy little ones to
the monster big ones paying five per cent. and blatantly lauded by
smug middle-class men who know but one thing about them, and that
one thing is their uninhabitableness. By this I do not mean that
the roofs leak or the walls are draughty; but what I do mean is that
life in them is degrading and unwholesome.

"The poor man's hotel," they are often called, but the phrase is
caricature. Not to possess a room to one's self, in which sometimes
to sit alone; to be forced out of bed willy-nilly, the first thing
in the morning; to engage and pay anew for a bed each night; and
never to have any privacy, surely is a mode of existence quite
different from that of hotel life.

This must not be considered a sweeping condemnation of the big
private and municipal lodging-houses and working-men's homes. Far
from it. They have remedied many of the atrocities attendant upon
the irresponsible small doss-houses, and they give the workman more
for his money than he ever received before; but that does not make
them as habitable or wholesome as the dwelling-place of a man should
be who does his work in the world.

The little private doss-houses, as a rule, are unmitigated horrors.
I have slept in them, and I know; but let me pass them by and
confine myself to the bigger and better ones. Not far from
Middlesex Street, Whitechapel, I entered such a house, a place
inhabited almost entirely by working men. The entrance was by way
of a flight of steps descending from the side-walk to what was
properly the cellar of the building. Here were two large and
gloomily lighted rooms, in which men cooked and ate. I had intended
to do some cooking myself, but the smell of the place stole away my
appetite, or, rather, wrested it from me; so I contented myself with
watching other men cook and eat.

One workman, home from work, sat down opposite me at the rough
wooden table, and began his meal. A handful of salt on the not
over-clean table constituted his butter. Into it he dipped his
bread, mouthful by mouthful, and washed it down with tea from a big
mug. A piece of fish completed his bill of fare. He ate silently,
looking neither to right nor left nor across at me. Here and there,
at the various tables, other men were eating, just as silently. In
the whole room there was hardly a note of conversation. A feeling
of gloom pervaded the ill-lighted place. Many of them sat and
brooded over the crumbs of their repast, and made me wonder, as
Childe Roland wondered, what evil they had done that they should be
punished so.

From the kitchen came the sounds of more genial life, and I ventured
into the range where the men were cooking. But the smell I had
noticed on entering was stronger here, and a rising nausea drove me
into the street for fresh air.

On my return I paid fivepence for a "cabin," took my receipt for the
same in the form of a huge brass check, and went upstairs to the
smoking-room. Here, a couple of small billiard tables and several
checkerboards were being used by young working-men, who waited in
relays for their turn at the games, while many men were sitting
around, smoking, reading, and mending their clothes. The young men
were hilarious, the old men were gloomy. In fact, there were two
types of men, the cheerful and the sodden or blue, and age seemed to
determine the classification.

But no more than the two cellar rooms did this room convey the
remotest suggestion of home. Certainly there could be nothing home-
like about it to you and me, who know what home really is. On the
walls were the most preposterous and insulting notices regulating
the conduct of the guests, and at ten o'clock the lights were put
out, and nothing remained but bed. This was gained by descending
again to the cellar, by surrendering the brass check to a burly
doorkeeper, and by climbing a long flight of stairs into the upper
regions. I went to the top of the building and down again, passing
several floors filled with sleeping men. The "cabins" were the best
accommodation, each cabin allowing space for a tiny bed and room
alongside of it in which to undress. The bedding was clean, and
with neither it nor the bed do I find any fault. But there was no
privacy about it, no being alone.

To get an adequate idea of a floor filled with cabins, you have
merely to magnify a layer of the pasteboard pigeon-holes of an egg-
crate till each pigeon-hole is seven feet in height and otherwise
properly dimensioned, then place the magnified layer on the floor of
a large, barnlike room, and there you have it. There are no
ceilings to the pigeon-holes, the walls are thin, and the snores
from all the sleepers and every move and turn of your nearer
neighbours come plainly to your ears. And this cabin is yours only
for a little while. In the morning out you go. You cannot put your
trunk in it, or come and go when you like, or lock the door behind
you, or anything of the sort. In fact, there is no door at all,
only a doorway. If you care to remain a guest in this poor man's
hotel, you must put up with all this, and with prison regulations
which impress upon you constantly that you are nobody, with little
soul of your own and less to say about it.

Now I contend that the least a man who does his day's work should
have is a room to himself, where he can lock the door and be safe in
his possessions; where he can sit down and read by a window or look
out; where he can come and go whenever he wishes; where he can
accumulate a few personal belongings other than those he carries
about with him on his back and in his pockets; where he can hang up
pictures of his mother, sister, sweet-heart, ballet dancers, or
bulldogs, as his heart listeth--in short, one place of his own on
the earth of which he can say: "This is mine, my castle; the world
stops at the threshold; here am I lord and master." He will be a
better citizen, this man; and he will do a better day's work.

I stood on one floor of the poor man's hotel and listened. I went
from bed to bed and looked at the sleepers. They were young men,
from twenty to forty, most of them. Old men cannot afford the
working-man's home. They go to the workhouse. But I looked at the
young men, scores of them, and they were not bad-looking fellows.
Their faces were made for women's kisses, their necks for women's
arms. They were lovable, as men are lovable. They were capable of
love. A woman's touch redeems and softens, and they needed such
redemption and softening instead of each day growing harsh and
harsher. And I wondered where these women were, and heard a
"harlot's ginny laugh." Leman Street, Waterloo Road, Piccadilly,
The Strand, answered me, and I knew where they were.



CHAPTER XXI--THE PRECARIOUSNESS OF LIFE



I was talking with a very vindictive man. In his opinion, his wife
had wronged him and the law had wronged him. The merits and morals
of the case are immaterial. The meat of the matter is that she had
obtained a separation, and he was compelled to pay ten shillings
each week for the support of her and the five children. "But look
you," said he to me, "wot'll 'appen to 'er if I don't py up the ten
shillings? S'posin', now, just s'posin' a accident 'appens to me,
so I cawn't work. S'posin' I get a rupture, or the rheumatics, or
the cholera. Wot's she goin' to do, eh? Wot's she goin' to do?"

He shook his head sadly. "No 'ope for 'er. The best she cawn do is
the work'ouse, an' that's 'ell. An' if she don't go to the
work'ouse, it'll be a worse 'ell. Come along 'ith me an' I'll show
you women sleepin' in a passage, a dozen of 'em. An' I'll show you
worse, wot she'll come to if anythin' 'appens to me and the ten
shillings."

The certitude of this man's forecast is worthy of consideration. He
knew conditions sufficiently to know the precariousness of his
wife's grasp on food and shelter. For her game was up when his
working capacity was impaired or destroyed. And when this state of
affairs is looked at in its larger aspect, the same will be found
true of hundreds of thousands and even millions of men and women
living amicably together and co-operating in the pursuit of food and
shelter.

The figures are appalling: 1,800,000 people in London live on the
poverty line and below it, and 1,000,000 live with one week's wages
between them and pauperism. In all England and Wales, eighteen per
cent. of the whole population are driven to the parish for relief,
and in London, according to the statistics of the London County
Council, twenty-one per cent. of the whole population are driven to
the parish for relief. Between being driven to the parish for
relief and being an out-and-out pauper there is a great difference,
yet London supports 123,000 paupers, quite a city of folk in
themselves. One in every four in London dies on public charity,
while 939 out of every 1000 in the United Kingdom die in poverty;
8,000,000 simply struggle on the ragged edge of starvation, and
20,000,000 more are not comfortable in the simple and clean sense of
the word.

It is interesting to go more into detail concerning the London
people who die on charity.

In 1886, and up to 1893, the percentage of pauperism to population
was less in London than in all England; but since 1893, and for
every succeeding year, the percentage of pauperism to population has
been greater in London than in all England. Yet, from the
Registrar-General's Report for 1886, the following figures are
taken:-


Out of 81,951 deaths in London (1884):-


In workhouses 9,909
In hospitals 6,559
In lunatic asylums 278
Total in public refuges 16,746


Commenting on these figures, a Fabian writer says: "Considering
that comparatively few of these are children, it is probable that
one in every three London adults will be driven into one of these
refuges to die, and the proportion in the case of the manual labour
class must of course be still larger."

These figures serve somewhat to indicate the proximity of the
average worker to pauperism. Various things make pauperism. An
advertisement, for instance, such as this, appearing in yesterday
morning's paper:-

"Clerk wanted, with knowledge of shorthand, typewriting, and
invoicing: wages ten shillings ($2.50) a week. Apply by letter,"
&c.

And in to-day's paper I read of a clerk, thirty-five years of age
and an inmate of a London workhouse, brought before a magistrate for
non-performance of task. He claimed that he had done his various
tasks since he had been an inmate; but when the master set him to
breaking stones, his hands blistered, and he could not finish the
task. He had never been used to an implement heavier than a pen, he
said. The magistrate sentenced him and his blistered hands to seven
days' hard labour.

Old age, of course, makes pauperism. And then there is the
accident, the thing happening, the death or disablement of the
husband, father, and bread-winner. Here is a man, with a wife and
three children, living on the ticklish security of twenty shillings
per week--and there are hundreds of thousands of such families in
London. Perforce, to even half exist, they must live up to the last
penny of it, so that a week's wages (one pound) is all that stands
between this family and pauperism or starvation. The thing happens,
the father is struck down, and what then? A mother with three
children can do little or nothing. Either she must hand her
children over to society as juvenile paupers, in order to be free to
do something adequate for herself, or she must go to the sweat-shops
for work which she can perform in the vile den possible to her
reduced income. But with the sweat-shops, married women who eke out
their husband's earnings, and single women who have but themselves
miserably to support, determine the scale of wages. And this scale
of wages, so determined, is so low that the mother and her three
children can live only in positive beastliness and semi-starvation,
till decay and death end their suffering.

To show that this mother, with her three children to support, cannot
compete in the sweating industries, I instance from the current
newspapers the two following cases:-

A father indignantly writes that his daughter and a girl companion
receive 8.5d. per gross for making boxes. They made each day four
gross. Their expenses were 8d. for car fare, 2d. for stamps, 2.5d.
for glue, and 1d. for string, so that all they earned between them
was 1s. 9d., or a daily wage each of 10.5d.

In the second ewe, before the Luton Guardians a few days ago, an old
woman of seventy-two appeared, asking for relief. "She was a straw-
hat maker, but had been compelled to give up the work owing to the
price she obtained for them--namely, 2.25d. each. For that price
she had to provide plait trimmings and make and finish the hats."

Yet this mother and her three children we are considering have done
no wrong that they should be so punished. They have not sinned.
The thing happened, that is all; the husband, father and bread-
winner, was struck down. There is no guarding against it. It is
fortuitous. A family stands so many chances of escaping the bottom
of the Abyss, and so many chances of falling plump down to it. The
chance is reducible to cold, pitiless figures, and a few of these
figures will not be out of place.

Sir A. Forwood calculates that -


1 of every 1400 workmen is killed annually.
1 of every 2500 workmen is totally disabled.
1 of every 300 workmen is permanently partially disabled.
1 of every 8 workmen is temporarily disabled 3 or 4 weeks.


But these are only the accidents of industry. The high mortality of
the people who live in the Ghetto plays a terrible part. The
average age at death among the people of the West End is fifty-five
years; the average age at death among the people of the East End is
thirty years. That is to say, the person in the West End has twice
the chance for life that the person has in the East End. Talk of
war! The mortality in South Africa and the Philippines fades away
to insignificance. Here, in the heart of peace, is where the blood
is being shed; and here not even the civilised rules of warfare
obtain, for the women and children and babes in the arms are killed
just as ferociously as the men are killed. War! In England, every
year, 500,000 men, women, and children, engaged in the various
industries, are killed and disabled, or are injured to disablement
by disease.

In the West End eighteen per cent. of the children die before five
years of age; in the East End fifty-five per cent. of the children
die before five years of age. And there are streets in London where
out of every one hundred children born in a year, fifty die during
the next year; and of the fifty that remain, twenty-five die before
they are five years old. Slaughter! Herod did not do quite so
badly.

That industry causes greater havoc with human life than battle does
no better substantiation can be given than the following extract
from a recent report of the Liverpool Medical Officer, which is not
applicable to Liverpool alone:-


In many instances little if any sunlight could get to the courts,
and the atmosphere within the dwellings was always foul, owing
largely to the saturated condition of the walls and ceilings, which
for so many years had absorbed the exhalations of the occupants into
their porous material. Singular testimony to the absence of
sunlight in these courts was furnished by the action of the Parks
and Gardens Committee, who desired to brighten the homes of the
poorest class by gifts of growing flowers and window-boxes; but
these gifts could not be made in courts such as these, AS FLOWERS
AND PLANTS WERE SUSCEPTIBLE TO THE UNWHOLESOME SURROUNDINGS, AND
WOULD NOT LIVE.

Mr. George Haw has compiled the following table on the three St.
George's parishes (London parishes):-


Percentage of
Population Death-rate
Overcrowded per 1000
St. George's West 10 13.2
St. George's South 35 23.7
St. George's East 40 26.4


Then there are the "dangerous trades," in which countless workers
are employed. Their hold on life is indeed precarious--far, far
more precarious than the hold of the twentieth-century soldier on
life. In the linen trade, in the preparation of the flax, wet feet
and wet clothes cause an unusual amount of bronchitis, pneumonia,
and severe rheumatism; while in the carding and spinning departments
the fine dust produces lung disease in the majority of cases, and
the woman who starts carding at seventeen or eighteen begins to
break up and go to pieces at thirty. The chemical labourers, picked
from the strongest and most splendidly-built men to be found, live,
on an average, less than forty-eight years.

Says Dr. Arlidge, of the potter's trade: "Potter's dust does not
kill suddenly, but settles, year after year, a little more firmly
into the lungs, until at length a case of plaster is formed.
Breathing becomes more and more difficult and depressed, and finally
ceases."

Steel dust, stone dust, clay dust, alkali dust, fluff dust, fibre
dust--all these things kill, and they are more deadly than machine-
guns and pom-poms. Worst of all is the lead dust in the white-lead
trades. Here is a description of the typical dissolution of a
young, healthy, well-developed girl who goes to work in a white-lead
factory:-


Here, after a varying degree of exposure, she becomes anaemic. It
may be that her gums show a very faint blue line, or perchance her
teeth and gums are perfectly sound, and no blue line is discernible.
Coincidently with the anaemia she has been getting thinner, but so
gradually as scarcely to impress itself upon her or her friends.
Sickness, however, ensues, and headaches, growing in intensity, are
developed. These are frequently attended by obscuration of vision
or temporary blindness. Such a girl passes into what appears to her
friends and medical adviser as ordinary hysteria. This gradually
deepens without warning, until she is suddenly seized with a
convulsion, beginning in one half of the face, then involving the
arm, next the leg of the same side of the body, until the
convulsion, violent and purely epileptic form in character, becomes
universal. This is attended by loss of consciousness, out of which
she passes into a series of convulsions, gradually increasing in
severity, in one of which she dies--or consciousness, partial or
perfect, is regained, either, it may be, for a few minutes, a few
hours, or days, during which violent headache is complained of, or
she is delirious and excited, as in acute mania, or dull and sullen
as in melancholia, and requires to be roused, when she is found
wandering, and her speech is somewhat imperfect. Without further
warning, save that the pulse, which has become soft, with nearly the
normal number of beats, all at once becomes low and hard; she is
suddenly seized with another convulsion, in which she dies, or
passes into a state of coma from which she never rallies. In
another case the convulsions will gradually subside, the headache
disappears and the patient recovers, only to find that she has
completely lost her eyesight, a loss that may be temporary or
permanent.


And here are a few specific cases of white-lead poisoning:-


Charlotte Rafferty, a fine, well-grown young woman with a splendid
constitution--who had never had a day's illness in her life--became
a white-lead worker. Convulsions seized her at the foot of the
ladder in the works. Dr. Oliver examined her, found the blue line
along her gums, which shows that the system is under the influence
of the lead. He knew that the convulsions would shortly return.
They did so, and she died.

Mary Ann Toler--a girl of seventeen, who had never had a fit in her
life--three times became ill, and had to leave off work in the
factory. Before she was nineteen she showed symptoms of lead
poisoning--had fits, frothed at the mouth, and died.

Mary A., an unusually vigorous woman, was able to work in the lead
factory for TWENTY YEARS, having colic once only during that time.
Her eight children all died in early infancy from convulsions. One
morning, whilst brushing her hair, this woman suddenly lost all
power in both her wrists.

Eliza H., aged twenty-five, AFTER FIVE MONTHS at lead works, was
seized with colic. She entered another factory (after being refused
by the first one) and worked on uninterruptedly for two years. Then
the former symptoms returned, she was seized with convulsions, and
died in two days of acute lead poisoning.


Mr. Vaughan Nash, speaking of the unborn generation, says: "The
children of the white-lead worker enter the world, as a rule, only
to die from the convulsions of lead poisoning--they are either born
prematurely, or die within the first year."

And, finally, let me instance the case of Harriet A. Walker, a young
girl of seventeen, killed while leading a forlorn hope on the
industrial battlefield. She was employed as an enamelled ware
brusher, wherein lead poisoning is encountered. Her father and
brother were both out of employment. She concealed her illness,
walked six miles a day to and from work, earned her seven or eight
shillings per week, and died, at seventeen.

Depression in trade also plays an important part in hurling the
workers into the Abyss. With a week's wages between a family and
pauperism, a month's enforced idleness means hardship and misery
almost indescribable, and from the ravages of which the victims do
not always recover when work is to be had again. Just now the daily
papers contain the report of a meeting of the Carlisle branch of the
Dockers' Union, wherein it is stated that many of the men, for
months past, have not averaged a weekly income of more than from
four to five shillings. The stagnated state of the shipping
industry in the port of London is held accountable for this
condition of affairs.

To the young working-man or working-woman, or married couple, there
is no assurance of happy or healthy middle life, nor of solvent old
age. Work as they will, they cannot make their future secure. It
is all a matter of chance. Everything depends upon the thing
happening, the thing with which they have nothing to do. Precaution
cannot fend it off, nor can wiles evade it. If they remain on the
industrial battlefield they must face it and take their chance
against heavy odds. Of course, if they are favourably made and are
not tied by kinship duties, they may run away from the industrial
battlefield. In which event the safest thing the man can do is to
join the army; and for the woman, possibly, to become a Red Cross
nurse or go into a nunnery. In either case they must forego home
and children and all that makes life worth living and old age other
than a nightmare.

THE PEOPLE OF THE ABYSS

by Jack London





CHAPTER XVII--INEFFICIENCY



I stopped a moment to listen to an argument on the Mile End Waste.
It was night-time, and they were all workmen of the better class.
They had surrounded one of their number, a pleasant-faced man of
thirty, and were giving it to him rather heatedly.

"But 'ow about this 'ere cheap immigration?" one of them demanded.
"The Jews of Whitechapel, say, a-cutting our throats right along?"

"You can't blame them," was the answer. "They're just like us, and
they've got to live. Don't blame the man who offers to work cheaper
than you and gets your job."

"But 'ow about the wife an' kiddies?" his interlocutor demanded.

"There you are," came the answer. "How about the wife and kiddies
of the man who works cheaper than you and gets your job? Eh? How
about his wife and kiddies? He's more interested in them than in
yours, and he can't see them starve. So he cuts the price of labour
and out you go. But you mustn't blame him, poor devil. He can't
help it. Wages always come down when two men are after the same
job. That's the fault of competition, not of the man who cuts the
price."

"But wyges don't come down where there's a union," the objection was
made.

"And there you are again, right on the head. The union cheeks
competition among the labourers, but makes it harder where there are
no unions. There's where your cheap labour of Whitechapel comes in.
They're unskilled, and have no unions, and cut each other's throats,
and ours in the bargain, if we don't belong to a strong union."

Without going further into the argument, this man on the Mile End
Waste pointed the moral that when two men were after the one job
wages were bound to fall. Had he gone deeper into the matter, he
would have found that even the union, say twenty thousand strong,
could not hold up wages if twenty thousand idle men were trying to
displace the union men. This is admirably instanced, just now, by
the return and disbandment of the soldiers from South Africa. They
find themselves, by tens of thousands, in desperate straits in the
army of the unemployed. There is a general decline in wages
throughout the land, which, giving rise to labour disputes and
strikes, is taken advantage of by the unemployed, who gladly pick up
the tools thrown down by the strikers.

Sweating, starvation wages, armies of unemployed, and great numbers
of the homeless and shelterless are inevitable when there are more
men to do work than there is work for men to do. The men and women
I have met upon the streets, and in the spikes and pegs, are not
there because as a mode of life it may be considered a "soft snap."
I have sufficiently outlined the hardships they undergo to
demonstrate that their existence is anything but "soft."

It is a matter of sober calculation, here in England, that it is
softer to work for twenty shillings a week, and have regular food,
and a bed at night, than it is to walk the streets. The man who
walks the streets suffers more, and works harder, for far less
return. I have depicted the nights they spend, and how, driven in
by physical exhaustion, they go to the casual ward for a "rest up."
Nor is the casual ward a soft snap. To pick four pounds of oakum,
break twelve hundredweight of stones, or perform the most revolting
tasks, in return for the miserable food and shelter they receive, is
an unqualified extravagance on the part of the men who are guilty of
it. On the part of the authorities it is sheer robbery. They give
the men far less for their labour than do the capitalistic
employers. The wage for the same amount of labour, performed for a
private employer, would buy them better beds, better food, more good
cheer, and, above all, greater freedom.

As I say, it is an extravagance for a man to patronise a casual
ward. And that they know it themselves is shown by the way these
men shun it till driven in by physical exhaustion. Then why do they
do it? Not because they are discouraged workers. The very opposite
is true; they are discouraged vagabonds. In the United States the
tramp is almost invariably a discouraged worker. He finds tramping
a softer mode of life than working. But this is not true in
England. Here the powers that be do their utmost to discourage the
tramp and vagabond, and he is, in all truth, a mightily discouraged
creature. He knows that two shillings a day, which is only fifty
cents, will buy him three fair meals, a bed at night, and leave him
a couple of pennies for pocket money. He would rather work for
those two shillings than for the charity of the casual ward; for he
knows that he would not have to work so hard, and that he would not
be so abominably treated. He does not do so, however, because there
are more men to do work than there is work for men to do.

When there are more men than there is work to be done, a sifting-out
process must obtain. In every branch of industry the less efficient
are crowded out. Being crowded out because of inefficiency, they
cannot go up, but must descend, and continue to descend, until they
reach their proper level, a place in the industrial fabric where
they are efficient. It follows, therefore, and it is inexorable,
that the least efficient must descend to the very bottom, which is
the shambles wherein they perish miserably.

A glance at the confirmed inefficients at the bottom demonstrates
that they are, as a rule, mental, physical, and moral wrecks. The
exceptions to the rule are the late arrivals, who are merely very
inefficient, and upon whom the wrecking process is just beginning to
operate. All the forces here, it must be remembered, are
destructive. The good body (which is there because its brain is not
quick and capable) is speedily wrenched and twisted out of shape;
the clean mind (which is there because of its weak body) is speedily
fouled and contaminated.

The mortality is excessive, but, even then, they die far too
lingering deaths.

Here, then, we have the construction of the Abyss and the shambles.
Throughout the whole industrial fabric a constant elimination is
going on. The inefficient are weeded out and flung downward.
Various things constitute inefficiency. The engineer who is
irregular or irresponsible will sink down until he finds his place,
say as a casual labourer, an occupation irregular in its very nature
and in which there is little or no responsibility. Those who are
slow and clumsy, who suffer from weakness of body or mind, or who
lack nervous, mental, and physical stamina, must sink down,
sometimes rapidly, sometimes step by step, to the bottom. Accident,
by disabling an efficient worker, will make him inefficient, and
down he must go. And the worker who becomes aged, with failing
energy and numbing brain, must begin the frightful descent which
knows no stopping-place short of the bottom and death.

In this last instance, the statistics of London tell a terrible
tale. The population of London is one-seventh of the total
population of the United Kingdom, and in London, year in and year
out, one adult in every four dies on public charity, either in the
workhouse, the hospital, or the asylum. When the fact that the
well-to-do do not end thus is taken into consideration, it becomes
manifest that it is the fate of at least one in every three adult
workers to die on public charity.

As an illustration of how a good worker may suddenly become
inefficient, and what then happens to him, I am tempted to give the
case of M'Garry, a man thirty-two years of age, and an inmate of the
workhouse. The extracts are quoted from the annual report of the
trade union.


I worked at Sullivan's place in Widnes, better known as the British
Alkali Chemical Works. I was working in a shed, and I had to cross
the yard. It was ten o'clock at night, and there was no light
about. While crossing the yard I felt something take hold of my leg
and screw it off. I became unconscious; I didn't know what became
of me for a day or two. On the following Sunday night I came to my
senses, and found myself in the hospital. I asked the nurse what
was to do with my legs, and she told me both legs were off.

There was a stationary crank in the yard, let into the ground; the
hole was 18 inches long, 15 inches deep, and 15 inches wide. The
crank revolved in the hole three revolutions a minute. There was no
fence or covering over the hole. Since my accident they have
stopped it altogether, and have covered the hole up with a piece of
sheet iron. . . . They gave me 25 pounds. They didn't reckon that
as compensation; they said it was only for charity's sake. Out of
that I paid 9 pounds for a machine by which to wheel myself about.

I was labouring at the time I got my legs off. I got twenty-four
shillings a week, rather better pay than the other men, because I
used to take shifts. When there was heavy work to be done I used to
be picked out to do it. Mr. Manton, the manager, visited me at the
hospital several times. When I was getting better, I asked him if
he would be able to find me a job. He told me not to trouble
myself, as the firm was not cold-hearted. I would be right enough
in any case . . . Mr. Manton stopped coming to see me; and the last
time, he said he thought of asking the directors to give me a fifty-
pound note, so I could go home to my friends in Ireland.


Poor M'Garry! He received rather better pay than the other men
because he was ambitious and took shifts, and when heavy work was to
be done he was the man picked out to do it. And then the thing
happened, and he went into the workhouse. The alternative to the
workhouse is to go home to Ireland and burden his friends for the
rest of his life. Comment is superfluous.

It must be understood that efficiency is not determined by the
workers themselves, but is determined by the demand for labour. If
three men seek one position, the most efficient man will get it.
The other two, no matter how capable they may be, will none the less
be inefficients. If Germany, Japan, and the United States should
capture the entire world market for iron, coal, and textiles, at
once the English workers would be thrown idle by hundreds of
thousands. Some would emigrate, but the rest would rush their
labour into the remaining industries. A general shaking up of the
workers from top to bottom would result; and when equilibrium had
been restored, the number of the inefficients at the bottom of the
Abyss would have been increased by hundreds of thousands. On the
other hand, conditions remaining constant and all the workers
doubling their efficiency, there would still be as many
inefficients, though each inefficient were twice as capable as he
had been and more capable than many of the efficients had previously
been.

When there are more men to work than there is work for men to do,
just as many men as are in excess of work will be inefficients, and
as inefficients they are doomed to lingering and painful
destruction. It shall be the aim of future chapters to show, by
their work and manner of living, not only how the inefficients are
weeded out and destroyed, but to show how inefficients are being
constantly and wantonly created by the forces of industrial society
as it exists to-day.



CHAPTER XVIII--WAGES



When I learned that in Lesser London there were 1,292,737 people who
received twenty-one shillings or less a week per family, I became
interested as to how the wages could best be spent in order to
maintain the physical efficiency of such families. Families of six,
seven, eight or ten being beyond consideration, I have based the
following table upon a family of five--a father, mother, and three
children; while I have made twenty-one shillings equivalent to
$5.25, though actually, twenty-one shillings are equivalent to about
$5.11.


Rent $1.50 or 6/0
Bread 1.00 " 4/0
Meat O.87.5 " 3/6
Vegetables O.62.5 " 2/6
Coals 0.25 " 1/0
Tea 0.18 " 0/9
Oil 0.16 " 0/8
Sugar 0.18 " 0/9
Milk 0.12 " 0/6
Soap 0.08 " 0/4
Butter 0.20 " 0/10
Firewood 0.08 " 0/4
Total $5.25 21/2


An analysis of one item alone will show how little room there is for
waste. Bread, $1: for a family of five, for seven days, one
dollar's worth of bread will give each a daily ration of 2.8 cents;
and if they eat three meals a day, each may consume per meal 9.5
mills' worth of bread, a little less than one halfpennyworth. Now
bread is the heaviest item. They will get less of meat per mouth
each meal, and still less of vegetates; while the smaller items
become too microscopic for consideration. On the other hand, these
food articles are all bought at small retail, the most expensive and
wasteful method of purchasing.

While the table given above will permit no extravagance, no
overloading of stomachs, it will be noticed that there is no
surplus. The whole guinea is spent for food and rent. There is no
pocket-money left over. Does the man buy a glass of beer, the
family must eat that much less; and in so far as it eats less, just
that far will it impair its physical efficiency. The members of
this family cannot ride in busses or trams, cannot write letters,
take outings, go to a "tu'penny gaff" for cheap vaudeville, join
social or benefit clubs, nor can they buy sweetmeats, tobacco,
books, or newspapers.

And further, should one child (and there are three) require a pair
of shoes, the family must strike meat for a week from its bill of
fare. And since there are five pairs of feet requiring shoes, and
five heads requiring hats, and five bodies requiring clothes, and
since there are laws regulating indecency, the family must
constantly impair its physical efficiency in order to keep warm and
out of jail. For notice, when rent, coals, oil, soap, and firewood
are extracted from the weekly income, there remains a daily
allowance for food of 4.5d. to each person; and that 4.5d. cannot be
lessened by buying clothes without impairing the physical
efficiency.

All of which is hard enough. But the thing happens; the husband and
father breaks his leg or his neck. No 4.5d. a day per mouth for
food is coming in; no halfpennyworth of bread per meal; and, at the
end of the week, no six shillings for rent. So out they must go, to
the streets or the workhouse, or to a miserable den, somewhere, in
which the mother will desperately endeavour to hold the family
together on the ten shillings she may possibly be able to earn.

While in London there are 1,292,737 people who receive twenty-one
shillings or less a week per family, it must be remembered that we
have investigated a family of five living on a twenty-one shilling
basis. There are larger families, there are many families that live
on less than twenty-one shillings, and there is much irregular
employment. The question naturally arises, How do THEY live? The
answer is that they do not live. They do not know what life is.
They drag out a subterbestial existence until mercifully released by
death.

Before descending to the fouler depths, let the case of the
telephone girls be cited. Here are clean, fresh English maids, for
whom a higher standard of living than that of the beasts is
absolutely necessary. Otherwise they cannot remain clean, fresh
English maids. On entering the service, a telephone girl receives a
weekly wage of eleven shillings. If she be quick and clever, she
may, at the end of five years, attain a minimum wage of one pound.
Recently a table of such a girl's weekly expenditure was furnished
to Lord Londonderry. Here it is:-

s. d.
Rent, fire, and light 7 6
Board at home 3 6
Board at the office 4 6
Street car fare 1 6
Laundry 1 0
Total 18 0


This leaves nothing for clothes, recreation, or sickness. And yet
many of the girls are receiving, not eighteen shillings, but eleven
shillings, twelve shillings, and fourteen shillings per week. They
must have clothes and recreation, and -


Man to Man so oft unjust,
Is always so to Woman.


At the Trades Union Congress now being held in London, the
Gasworkers' Union moved that instructions be given the Parliamentary
Committee to introduce a Bill to prohibit the employment of children
under fifteen years of age. Mr. Shackleton, Member of Parliament
and a representative of the Northern Counties Weavers, opposed the
resolution on behalf of the textile workers, who, he said, could not
dispense with the earnings of their children and live on the scale
of wages which obtained. The representatives of 514,000 workers
voted against the resolution, while the representatives of 535,000
workers voted in favour of it. When 514,000 workers oppose a
resolution prohibiting child-labour under fifteen, it is evident
that a less-than-living wage is being paid to an immense number of
the adult workers of the country.

I have spoken with women in Whitechapel who receive right along less
than one shilling for a twelve-hour day in the coat-making sweat
shops; and with women trousers finishers who receive an average
princely and weekly wage of three to four shillings.

A case recently cropped up of men, in the employ of a wealthy
business house, receiving their board and six shillings per week for
six working days of sixteen hours each. The sandwich men get
fourteenpence per day and find themselves. The average weekly
earnings of the hawkers and costermongers are not more than ten to
twelve shillings. The average of all common labourers, outside the
dockers, is less than sixteen shillings per week, while the dockers
average from eight to nine shillings. These figures are taken from
a royal commission report and are authentic.

Conceive of an old woman, broken and dying, supporting herself and
four children, and paying three shillings per week rent, by making
match boxes at 2.25d. per gross. Twelve dozen boxes for 2.25d.,
and, in addition, finding her own paste and thread! She never knew
a clay off, either for sickness, rest, or recreation. Each day and
every day, Sundays as well, she toiled fourteen hours. Her day's
stint was seven gross, for which she received 1s. 3.75d. In the
week of ninety-eight hours' work, she made 7066 match boxes, and
earned 4s. 10.25d., less per paste and thread.

Last year, Mr. Thomas Holmes, a police-court missionary of note,
after writing about the condition of the women workers, received the
following letter, dated April 18, 1901:-


Sir,--Pardon the liberty I am taking, but, having read what you said
about poor women working fourteen hours a day for ten shillings per
week, I beg to state my case. I am a tie-maker, who, after working
all the week, cannot earn more than five shillings, and I have a
poor afflicted husband to keep who hasn't earned a penny for more
than ten years.


Imagine a woman, capable of writing such a clear, sensible,
grammatical letter, supporting her husband and self on five
shillings per week! Mr. Holmes visited her. He had to squeeze to
get into the room. There lay her sick husband; there she worked all
day long; there she cooked, ate, washed, and slept; and there her
husband and she performed all the functions of living and dying.
There was no space for the missionary to sit down, save on the bed,
which was partially covered with ties and silk. The sick man's
lungs were in the last stages of decay. He coughed and expectorated
constantly, the woman ceasing from her work to assist him in his
paroxysms. The silken fluff from the ties was not good for his
sickness; nor was his sickness good for the ties, and the handlers
and wearers of the ties yet to come.

Another case Mr. Holmes visited was that of a young girl, twelve
years of age, charged in the police court with stealing food. He
found her the deputy mother of a boy of nine, a crippled boy of
seven, and a younger child. Her mother was a widow and a blouse-
maker. She paid five shillings a week rent. Here are the last
items in her housekeeping account: Tea. 0.5d.; sugar, 0.5d.; bread,
0.25d.; margarine, 1d.; oil, 1.5d.; and firewood, 1d. Good
housewives of the soft and tender folk, imagine yourselves marketing
and keeping house on such a scale, setting a table for five, and
keeping an eye on your deputy mother of twelve to see that she did
not steal food for her little brothers and sisters, the while you
stitched, stitched, stitched at a nightmare line of blouses, which
stretched away into the gloom and down to the pauper's coffin a-yawn
for you.



CHAPTER XIX--THE GHETTO



Is it well that while we range with Science, glorying in the time,
City children soak and blacken soul and sense in city slime?
There among the gloomy alleys Progress halts on palsied feet;
Crime and hunger cast out maidens by the thousand on the street;

There the master scrimps his haggard seamstress of her daily bread;
There the single sordid attic holds the living and the dead;
There the smouldering fire of fever creeps across the rotted floor,
And the crowded couch of incest, in the warrens of the poor.


At one time the nations of Europe confined the undesirable Jews in
city ghettos. But to-day the dominant economic class, by less
arbitrary but none the less rigorous methods, has confined the
undesirable yet necessary workers into ghettos of remarkable
meanness and vastness. East London is such a ghetto, where the rich
and the powerful do not dwell, and the traveller cometh not, and
where two million workers swarm, procreate, and die.

It must not be supposed that all the workers of London are crowded
into the East End, but the tide is setting strongly in that
direction. The poor quarters of the city proper are constantly
being destroyed, and the main stream of the unhoused is toward the
east. In the last twelve years, one district, "London over the
Border," as it is called, which lies well beyond Aldgate,
Whitechapel, and Mile End, has increased 260,000, or over sixty per
cent. The churches in this district, by the way, can seat but one
in every thirty-seven of the added population.

The City of Dreadful Monotony, the East End is often called,
especially by well-fed, optimistic sightseers, who look over the
surface of things and are merely shocked by the intolerable sameness
and meanness of it all. If the East End is worthy of no worse title
than The City of Dreadful Monotony, and if working people are
unworthy of variety and beauty and surprise, it would not be such a
bad place in which to live. But the East End does merit a worse
title. It should be called The City of Degradation.

While it is not a city of slums, as some people imagine, it may well
be said to be one gigantic slum. From the standpoint of simple
decency and clean manhood and womanhood, any mean street, of all its
mean streets, is a slum. Where sights and sounds abound which
neither you nor I would care to have our children see and hear is a
place where no man's children should live, and see, and hear. Where
you and I would not care to have our wives pass their lives is a
place where no other man's wife should have to pass her life. For
here, in the East End, the obscenities and brute vulgarities of life
are rampant. There is no privacy. The bad corrupts the good, and
all fester together. Innocent childhood is sweet and beautiful:
but in East London innocence is a fleeting thing, and you must catch
them before they crawl out of the cradle, or you will find the very
babes as unholily wise as you.

The application of the Golden Rule determines that East London is an
unfit place in which to live. Where you would not have your own
babe live, and develop, and gather to itself knowledge of life and
the things of life, is not a fit place for the babes of other men to
live, and develop, and gather to themselves knowledge of life and
the things of life. It is a simple thing, this Golden Rule, and all
that is required. Political economy and the survival of the fittest
can go hang if they say otherwise. What is not good enough for you
is not good enough for other men, and there's no more to be said.

There are 300,000 people in London, divided into families, that live
in one-room tenements. Far, far more live in two and three rooms
and are as badly crowded, regardless of sex, as those that live in
one room. The law demands 400 cubic feet of space for each person.
In army barracks each soldier is allowed 600 cubic feet. Professor
Huxley, at one time himself a medical officer in East London, always
held that each person should have 800 cubic feet of space, and that
it should be well ventilated with pure air. Yet in London there are
900,000 people living in less than the 400 cubic feet prescribed by
the law.

Mr. Charles Booth, who engaged in a systematic work of years in
charting and classifying the toiling city population, estimates that
there are 1,800,000 people in London who are POOR and VERY POOR. It
is of interest to mark what he terms poor. By POOR he means
families which have a total weekly income of from eighteen to
twenty-one shillings. The VERY POOR fall greatly below this
standard.

The workers, as a class, are being more and more segregated by their
economic masters; and this process, with its jamming and
overcrowding, tends not so much toward immorality as unmorality.
Here is an extract from a recent meeting of the London County
Council, terse and bald, but with a wealth of horror to be read
between the lines:-


Mr. Bruce asked the Chairman of the Public Health Committee whether
his attention had been called to a number of cases of serious
overcrowding in the East End. In St. Georges-in-the-East a man and
his wife and their family of eight occupied one small room. This
family consisted of five daughters, aged twenty, seventeen, eight,
four, and an infant; and three sons, aged fifteen, thirteen, and
twelve. In Whitechapel a man and his wife and their three
daughters, aged sixteen, eight, and four, and two sons, aged ten and
twelve years, occupied a smaller room. In Bethnal Green a man and
his wife, with four sons, aged twenty-three, twenty-one, nineteen,
and sixteen, and two daughters, aged fourteen and seven, were also
found in one room. He asked whether it was not the duty of the
various local authorities to prevent such serious overcrowding.


But with 900,000 people actually living under illegal conditions,
the authorities have their hands full. When the overcrowded folk
are ejected they stray off into some other hole; and, as they move
their belongings by night, on hand-barrows (one hand-barrow
accommodating the entire household goods and the sleeping children),
it is next to impossible to keep track of them. If the Public
Health Act of 1891 were suddenly and completely enforced, 900,000
people would receive notice to clear out of their houses and go on
to the streets, and 500,000 rooms would have to be built before they
were all legally housed again.

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
grey 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
human 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 labourer 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 ten houses--fifty-one 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 six houses and twenty-two rooms were 84 people--
again 6, 7, 8, and 9 being the number living in one room, in several
instances. In one house with eight 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 four to six shillings per week for one
room, while skilled mechanics, earning thirty-five shillings per
week, are forced to part with fifteen shillings 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 thirteen to eighteen shillings; in another street from eleven
to sixteen shillings; and in another street, from eleven to fifteen
shillings; while in Whitechapel, two-room houses that recently
rented for ten shillings are now costing twenty-one shillings.
East, west, north, and south the rents are going up. When land is
worth from 20,000 pounds to 30,000 pounds 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 fourteen shillings per week. She gets her living by
letting the house to lodgers and doing a day's washing or charring.
That woman, with tears in her eyes, told me that the landlord had
increased the rent from fourteen shillings to eighteen 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 vigour 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 a 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
over-wrought 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 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 Mr. Stopford
Brooke, after drawing a frightful London picture, finds himself
compelled to multiply it by half a million. Here it is:-


I often used to meet, when I was curate at Kensington, families
drifting into London along the Hammersmith Road. One day there came
along a labourer and his wife, his son and two daughters. Their
family had lived for a long time on an estate in the country, and
managed, with the help of the common-land and their labour, to get
on. But the time came when the common was encroached upon, and
their labour was not needed on the estate, and they were quietly
turned out of their cottage. Where should they go? Of course to
London, where work was thought to be plentiful. They had a little
savings, and they thought they could get two decent rooms to live
in. But the inexorable land question met them in London. They
tried the decent courts for lodgings, and found that two rooms would
cost ten shillings a week. Food was dear and bad, water was bad,
and in a short time their health suffered. Work was hard to get,
and its wage was so low that they were soon in debt. They became
more ill and more despairing with the poisonous surroundings, the
darkness, and the long hours of work; and they were driven forth to
seek a cheaper lodging. They found it in a court I knew well--a
hotbed of crime and nameless horrors. In this they got a single
room at a cruel rent, and work was more difficult for them to get
now, as they came from a place of such bad repute, and they fell
into the hands of those who sweat the last drop out of man and woman
and child, for wages which are the food only of despair. And the
darkness and the dirt, the bad food and the sickness, and the want
of water was worse than before; and the crowd and the companionship
of the court robbed them of the last shreds of self-respect. The
drink demon seized upon them. Of course there was a public-house at
both ends of the court. There they fled, one and all, for shelter,
and warmth, and society, and forgetfulness. And they came out in
deeper debt, with inflamed senses and burning brains, and an
unsatisfied craving for drink they would do anything to satiate.
And in a few months the father was in prison, the wife dying, the
son a criminal, and the daughters on the street. MULTIPLY THIS BY
HALF A MILLION, AND YOU WILL BE BENEATH THE TRUTH.


No more dreary spectacle can be found on this earth than the whole
of the "awful East," with its Whitechapel, Hoxton, Spitalfields,
Bethnal Green, and Wapping to the East India Docks. The colour of
life is grey and drab. Everything is helpless, hopeless,
unrelieved, and dirty. Bath tubs are a thing totally unknown, as
mythical as the ambrosia of the gods. The people themselves are
dirty, while any attempt at cleanliness becomes howling farce, when
it is not pitiful and tragic. Strange, vagrant odours come drifting
along the greasy wind, and the rain, when it falls, is more like
grease than water from heaven. The very cobblestones are scummed
with grease.

Here lives a population as dull and unimaginative as its long grey
miles of dingy brick. Religion has virtually passed it by, and a
gross and stupid materialism reigns, fatal alike to the things of
the spirit and the finer instincts of life.

It used to be the proud boast that every Englishman's home was his
castle. But to-day it is an anachronism. The Ghetto folk have no
homes. They do not know the significance and the sacredness of home
life. Even the municipal dwellings, where live the better-class
workers, are overcrowded barracks. They have no home life. The
very language proves it. The father returning from work asks his
child in the street where her mother is; and back the answer comes,
"In the buildings."

A new race has sprung up, a street people. They pass their lives at
work and in the streets. They have dens and lairs into which to
crawl for sleeping purposes, and that is all. One cannot travesty
the word by calling such dens and lairs "homes." The traditional
silent and reserved Englishman has passed away. The pavement folk
are noisy, voluble, high-strung, excitable--when they are yet young.
As they grow older they become steeped and stupefied in beer. When
they have nothing else to do, they ruminate as a cow ruminates.
They are to be met with everywhere, standing on curbs and corners,
and staring into vacancy. Watch one of them. He will stand there,
motionless, for hours, and when you go away you will leave him still
staring into vacancy. It is most absorbing. He has no money for
beer, and his lair is only for sleeping purposes, so what else
remains for him to do? He has already solved the mysteries of
girl's love, and wife's love, and child's love, and found them
delusions and shams, vain and fleeting as dew-drops, quick-vanishing
before the ferocious facts of life.

As I say, the young are high-strung, nervous, excitable; the middle-
aged are empty-headed, stolid, and stupid. It is absurd to think
for an instant that they can compete with the workers of the New
World. Brutalised, degraded, and dull, the Ghetto folk will be
unable to render efficient service to England in the world struggle
for industrial supremacy which economists declare has already begun.
Neither as workers nor as soldiers can they come up to the mark when
England, in her need, calls upon them, her forgotten ones; and if
England be flung out of the world's industrial orbit, they will
perish like flies at the end of summer. Or, with England critically
situated, and with them made desperate as wild beasts are made
desperate, they may become a menace and go "swelling" down to the
West End to return the "slumming" the West End has done in the East.
In which case, before rapid-fire guns and the modern machinery of
warfare, they will perish the more swiftly and easily.

THE PEOPLE OF THE ABYSS

by Jack London




CHAPTER XIV--HOPS AND HOPPERS



So far has the divorcement of the worker from the soil proceeded,
that the farming districts, the civilised world over, are dependent
upon the cities for the gathering of the harvests. Then it is, when
the land is spilling its ripe wealth to waste, that the street folk,
who have been driven away from the soil, are called back to it
again. But in England they return, not as prodigals, but as
outcasts still, as vagrants and pariahs, to be doubted and flouted
by their country brethren, to sleep in jails and casual wards, or
under the hedges, and to live the Lord knows how.

It is estimated that Kent alone requires eighty thousand of the
street people to pick her hops. And out they come, obedient to the
call, which is the call of their bellies and of the lingering dregs
of adventure-lust still in them. Slum, stews, and ghetto pour them
forth, and the festering contents of slum, stews, and ghetto are
undiminished. Yet they overrun the country like an army of ghouls,
and the country does not want them. They are out of place. As they
drag their squat, misshapen bodies along the highways and byways,
they resemble some vile spawn from underground. Their very
presence, the fact of their existence, is an outrage to the fresh,
bright sun and the green and growing things. The clean, upstanding
trees cry shame upon them and their withered crookedness, and their
rottenness is a slimy desecration of the sweetness and purity of
nature.

Is the picture overdrawn? It all depends. For one who sees and
thinks life in terms of shares and coupons, it is certainly
overdrawn. But for one who sees and thinks life in terms of manhood
and womanhood, it cannot be overdrawn. Such hordes of beastly
wretchedness and inarticulate misery are no compensation for a
millionaire brewer who lives in a West End palace, sates himself
with the sensuous delights of London's golden theatres, hobnobs with
lordlings and princelings, and is knighted by the king. Wins his
spurs--God forbid! In old time the great blonde beasts rode in the
battle's van and won their spurs by cleaving men from pate to chine.
And, after all, it is finer to kill a strong man with a clean-
slicing blow of singing steel than to make a beast of him, and of
his seed through the generations, by the artful and spidery
manipulation of industry and politics.

But to return to the hops. Here the divorcement from the soil is as
apparent as in every other agricultural line in England. While the
manufacture of beer steadily increases, the growth of hops steadily
decreases. In 1835 the acreage under hops was 71,327. To-day it
stands at 48,024, a decrease of 3103 from the acreage of last year.

Small as the acreage is this year, a poor summer and terrible storms
reduced the yield. This misfortune is divided between the people
who own hops and the people who pick hops. The owners perforce must
put up with less of the nicer things of life, the pickers with less
grub, of which, in the best of times, they never get enough. For
weary weeks headlines like the following have appeared in the London
papers.-


TRAMPS PLENTIFUL, BUT THE HOPS ARE FEW AND NOT YET READY.


Then there have been numberless paragraphs like this:-


From the neighbourhood of the hop fields comes news of a distressing
nature. The bright outburst of the last two days has sent many
hundreds of hoppers into Kent, who will have to wait till the fields
are ready for them. At Dover the number of vagrants in the
workhouse is treble the number there last year at this time, and in
other towns the lateness of the season is responsible for a large
increase in the number of casuals.


To cap their wretchedness, when at last the picking had begun, hops
and hoppers were well-nigh swept away by a frightful storm of wind,
rain, and hail. The hops were stripped clean from the poles and
pounded into the earth, while the hoppers, seeking shelter from the
stinging hail, were close to drowning in their huts and camps on the
low-lying ground. Their condition after the storm was pitiable,
their state of vagrancy more pronounced than ever; for, poor crop
that it was, its destruction had taken away the chance of earning a
few pennies, and nothing remained for thousands of them but to "pad
the hoof" back to London.

"We ayn't crossin'-sweepers," they said, turning away from the
ground, carpeted ankle-deep with hops.

Those that remained grumbled savagely among the half-stripped poles
at the seven bushels for a shilling--a rate paid in good seasons
when the hops are in prime condition, and a rate likewise paid in
bad seasons by the growers because they cannot afford more.

I passed through Teston and East and West Farleigh shortly after the
storm, and listened to the grumbling of the hoppers and saw the hops
rotting on the ground. At the hothouses of Barham Court, thirty
thousand panes of glass had been broken by the hail, while peaches,
plums, pears, apples, rhubarb, cabbages, mangolds, everything, had
been pounded to pieces and torn to shreds.

All of which was too bad for the owners, certainly; but at the
worst, not one of them, for one meal, would have to go short of food
or drink. Yet it was to them that the newspapers devoted columns of
sympathy, their pecuniary losses being detailed at harrowing length.
"Mr. Herbert L- calculates his loss at 8000 pounds;" "Mr. F-, of
brewery fame, who rents all the land in this parish, loses 10,000
pounds;" and "Mr. L-, the Wateringbury brewer, brother to Mr.
Herbert L-, is another heavy loser." As for the hoppers, they did
not count. Yet I venture to assert that the several almost-square
meals lost by underfed William Buggles, and underfed Mrs. Buggles,
and the underfed Buggles kiddies, was a greater tragedy than the
10,000 pounds lost by Mr. F-. And in addition, underfed William
Buggles' tragedy might be multiplied by thousands where Mr. F-'s
could not be multiplied by five.

To see how William Buggles and his kind fared, I donned my seafaring
togs and started out to get a job. With me was a young East London
cobbler, Bert, who had yielded to the lure of adventure and joined
me for the trip. Acting on my advice, he had brought his "worst
rags," and as we hiked up the London road out of Maidstone he was
worrying greatly for fear we had come too ill-dressed for the
business.

Nor was he to be blamed. When we stopped in a tavern the publican
eyed us gingerly, nor did his demeanour brighten till we showed him
the colour of our cash. The natives along the coast were all
dubious; and "bean-feasters" from London, dashing past in coaches,
cheered and jeered and shouted insulting things after us. But
before we were done with the Maidstone district my friend found that
we were as well clad, if not better, than the average hopper. Some
of the bunches of rags we chanced upon were marvellous.

"The tide is out," called a gypsy-looking woman to her mates, as we
came up a long row of bins into which the pickers were stripping the
hops.

"Do you twig?" Bert whispered. "She's on to you."

I twigged. And it must be confessed the figure was an apt one.
When the tide is out boats are left on the beach and do not sail,
and a sailor, when the tide is out, does not sail either. My
seafaring togs and my presence in the hop field proclaimed that I
was a seaman without a ship, a man on the beach, and very like a
craft at low water.

"Can yer give us a job, governor?" Bert asked the bailiff, a kindly
faced and elderly man who was very busy.

His "No" was decisively uttered; but Bert clung on and followed him
about, and I followed after, pretty well all over the field.
Whether our persistency struck the bailiff as anxiety to work, or
whether he was affected by our hard-luck appearance and tale,
neither Bert nor I succeeded in making out; but in the end he
softened his heart and found us the one unoccupied bin in the place-
-a bin deserted by two other men, from what I could learn, because
of inability to make living wages.

"No bad conduct, mind ye," warned the bailiff, as he left us at work
in the midst of the women.

It was Saturday afternoon, and we knew quitting time would come
early; so we applied ourselves earnestly to the task, desiring to
learn if we could at least make our salt. It was simple work,
woman's work, in fact, and not man's. We sat on the edge of the
bin, between the standing hops, while a pole-puller supplied us with
great fragrant branches. In an hour's time we became as expert as
it is possible to become. As soon as the fingers became accustomed
automatically to differentiate between hops and leaves and to strip
half-a-dozen blossoms at a time there was no more to learn.

We worked nimbly, and as fast as the women themselves, though their
bins filled more rapidly because of their swarming children, each of
which picked with two hands almost as fast as we picked.

" Don'tcher pick too clean, it's against the rules," one of the
women informed us; and we took the tip and were grateful.

As the afternoon wore along, we realised that living wages could not
be made--by men. Women could pick as much as men, and children
could do almost as well as women; so it was impossible for a man to
compete with a woman and half-a-dozen children. For it is the woman
and the half-dozen children who count as a unit, and by their
combined capacity determine the unit's pay.

"I say, matey, I'm beastly hungry," said I to Bert. We had not had
any dinner.

"Blimey, but I could eat the 'ops," he replied.

Whereupon we both lamented our negligence in not rearing up a
numerous progeny to help us in this day of need. And in such
fashion we whiled away the time and talked for the edification of
our neighbours. We quite won the sympathy of the pole-puller, a
young country yokel, who now and again emptied a few picked blossoms
into our bin, it being part of his business to gather up the stray
clusters torn off in the process of pulling.

With him we discussed how much we could "sub," and were informed
that while we were being paid a shilling for seven bushels, we could
only "sub," or have advanced to us, a shilling for every twelve
bushels. Which is to say that the pay for five out of every twelve
bushels was withheld--a method of the grower to hold the hopper to
his work whether the crop runs good or bad, and especially if it
runs bad.

After all, it was pleasant sitting there in the bright sunshine, the
golden pollen showering from our hands, the pungent aromatic odour
of the hops biting our nostrils, and the while remembering dimly the
sounding cities whence these people came. Poor street people! Poor
gutter folk! Even they grow earth-hungry, and yearn vaguely for the
soil from which they have been driven, and for the free life in the
open, and the wind and rain and sun all undefiled by city smirches.
As the sea calls to the sailor, so calls the land to them; and, deep
down in their aborted and decaying carcasses, they are stirred
strangely by the peasant memories of their forbears who lived before
cities were. And in incomprehensible ways they are made glad by the
earth smells and sights and sounds which their blood has not
forgotten though unremembered by them.

"No more 'ops, matey," Bert complained.

It was five o'clock, and the pole-pullers had knocked off, so that
everything could be cleaned up, there being no work on Sunday. For
an hour we were forced idly to wait the coming of the measurers, our
feet tingling with the frost which came on the heels of the setting
sun. In the adjoining bin, two women and half-a-dozen children had
picked nine bushels: so that the five bushels the measurers found
in our bin demonstrated that we had done equally well, for the half-
dozen children had ranged from nine to fourteen years of age.

Five bushels! We worked it out to eight-pence ha'penny, or
seventeen cents, for two men working three hours and a half.
Fourpence farthing apiece! a little over a penny an hour! But we
were allowed only to "sub" fivepence of the total sum, though the
tally-keeper, short of change, gave us sixpence. Entreaty was in
vain. A hard-luck story could not move him. He proclaimed loudly
that we had received a penny more than our due, and went his way.

Granting, for the sake of the argument, that we were what we
represented ourselves to be--namely, poor men and broke--then here
was out position: night was coming on; we had had no supper, much
less dinner; and we possessed sixpence between us. I was hungry
enough to eat three sixpenn'orths of food, and so was Bert. One
thing was patent. By doing 16.3 per cent. justice to our stomachs,
we would expend the sixpence, and our stomachs would still be
gnawing under 83.3 per cent. injustice. Being broke again, we could
sleep under a hedge, which was not so bad, though the cold would sap
an undue portion of what we had eaten. But the morrow was Sunday,
on which we could do no work, though our silly stomachs would not
knock off on that account. Here, then, was the problem: how to get
three meals on Sunday, and two on Monday (for we could not make
another "sub" till Monday evening).

We knew that the casual wards were over-crowded; also, that if we
begged from farmer or villager, there was a large likelihood of our
going to jail for fourteen days. What was to be done? We looked at
each other in despair -

- Not a bit of it. We joyfully thanked God that we were not as
other men, especially hoppers, and went down the road to Maidstone,
jingling in our pockets the half-crowns and florins we had brought
from London.



CHAPTER XV--THE SEA WIFE



You might not expect to find the Sea Wife in the heart of Kent, but
that is where I found her, in a mean street, in the poor quarter of
Maidstone. In her window she had no sign of lodgings to let, and
persuasion was necessary before she could bring herself to let me
sleep in her front room. In the evening I descended to the semi-
subterranean kitchen, and talked with her and her old man, Thomas
Mugridge by name.

And as I talked to them, all the subtleties and complexities of this
tremendous machine civilisation vanished away. It seemed that I
went down through the skin and the flesh to the naked soul of it,
and in Thomas Mugridge and his old woman gripped hold of the essence
of this remarkable English breed. I found there the spirit of the
wanderlust which has lured Albion's sons across the zones; and I
found there the colossal unreckoning which has tricked the English
into foolish squabblings and preposterous fights, and the doggedness
and stubbornness which have brought them blindly through to empire
and greatness; and likewise I found that vast, incomprehensible
patience which has enabled the home population to endure under the
burden of it all, to toil without complaint through the weary years,
and docilely to yield the best of its sons to fight and colonise to
the ends of the earth.

Thomas Mugridge was seventy-one years old and a little man. It was
because he was little that he had not gone for a soldier. He had
remained at home and worked. His first recollections were connected
with work. He knew nothing else but work. He had worked all his
days, and at seventy-one he still worked. Each morning saw him up
with the lark and afield, a day labourer, for as such he had been
born. Mrs. Mugridge was seventy-three. From seven years of age she
had worked in the fields, doing a boy's work at first, and later a
man's. She still worked, keeping the house shining, washing,
boiling, and baking, and, with my advent, cooking for me and shaming
me by making my bed. At the end of threescore years and more of
work they possessed nothing, had nothing to look forward to save
more work. And they were contented. They expected nothing else,
desired nothing else.

They lived simply. Their wants were few--a pint of beer at the end
of the day, sipped in the semi-subterranean kitchen, a weekly paper
to pore over for seven nights hand-running, and conversation as
meditative and vacant as the chewing of a heifer's cud. From a wood
engraving on the wall a slender, angelic girl looked down upon them,
and underneath was the legend: "Our Future Queen." And from a
highly coloured lithograph alongside looked down a stout and elderly
lady, with underneath: "Our Queen--Diamond Jubilee."

"What you earn is sweetest," quoth Mrs. Mugridge, when I suggested
that it was about time they took a rest.

"No, an' we don't want help," said Thomas Mugridge, in reply to my
question as to whether the children lent them a hand.

"We'll work till we dry up and blow away, mother an' me," he added;
and Mrs. Mugridge nodded her head in vigorous indorsement.

Fifteen children she had borne, and all were away and gone, or dead.
The "baby," however, lived in Maidstone, and she was twenty-seven.
When the children married they had their hands full with their own
families and troubles, like their fathers and mothers before them.

Where were the children? Ah, where were they not? Lizzie was in
Australia; Mary was in Buenos Ayres; Poll was in New York; Joe had
died in India--and so they called them up, the living and the dead,
soldier and sailor, and colonist's wife, for the traveller's sake
who sat in their kitchen.

They passed me a photograph. A trim young fellow, in soldier's garb
looked out at me.

"And which son is this?" I asked.

They laughed a hearty chorus. Son! Nay, grandson, just back from
Indian service and a soldier-trumpeter to the King. His brother was
in the same regiment with him. And so it ran, sons and daughters,
and grand sons and daughters, world-wanderers and empire-builders,
all of them, while the old folks stayed at home and worked at
building empire too.


"There dwells a wife by the Northern Gate,
And a wealthy wife is she;
She breeds a breed o' rovin' men
And casts them over sea.

"And some are drowned in deep water,
And some in sight of shore;
And word goes back to the weary wife,
And ever she sends more."


But the Sea Wife's child-bearing is about done. The stock is
running out, and the planet is filling up. The wives of her sons
may carry on the breed, but her work is past. The erstwhile men of
England are now the men of Australia, of Africa, of America.
England has sent forth "the best she breeds" for so long, and has
destroyed those that remained so fiercely, that little remains for
her to do but to sit down through the long nights and gaze at
royalty on the wall.

The true British merchant seaman has passed away. The merchant
service is no longer a recruiting ground for such sea dogs as fought
with Nelson at Trafalgar and the Nile. Foreigners largely man the
merchant ships, though Englishmen still continue to officer them and
to prefer foreigners for'ard. In South Africa the colonial teaches
the islander how to shoot, and the officers muddle and blunder;
while at home the street people play hysterically at mafficking, and
the War Office lowers the stature for enlistment.

It could not be otherwise. The most complacent Britisher cannot
hope to draw off the life-blood, and underfeed, and keep it up
forever. The average Mrs. Thomas Mugridge has been driven into the
city, and she is not breeding very much of anything save an anaemic
and sickly progeny which cannot find enough to eat. The strength of
the English-speaking race to-day is not in the tight little island,
but in the New World overseas, where are the sons and daughters of
Mrs. Thomas Mugridge. The Sea Wife by the Northern Gate has just
about done her work in the world, though she does not realize it.
She must sit down and rest her tired loins for a space; and if the
casual ward and the workhouse do not await her, it is because of the
sons and daughters she has reared up against the day of her
feebleness and decay.



CHAPTER XVI--PROPERTY VERSUS PERSON



In a civilisation frankly materialistic and based upon property, not
soul, it is inevitable that property shall be exalted over soul,
that crimes against property shall be considered far more serious
than crimes against the person. To pound one's wife to a jelly and
break a few of her ribs is a trivial offence compared with sleeping
out under the naked stars because one has not the price of a doss.
The lad who steals a few pears from a wealthy railway corporation is
a greater menace to society than the young brute who commits an
unprovoked assault upon an old man over seventy years of age. While
the young girl who takes a lodging under the pretence that she has
work commits so dangerous an offence, that, were she not severely
punished, she and her kind might bring the whole fabric of property
clattering to the ground. Had she unholily tramped Piccadilly and
the Strand after midnight, the police would not have interfered with
her, and she would have been able to pay for her lodging.

The following illustrative cases are culled from the police-court
reports for a single week:-


Widnes Police Court. Before Aldermen Gossage and Neil. Thomas
Lynch, charged with being drunk and disorderly and with assaulting a
constable. Defendant rescued a woman from custody, kicked the
constable, and threw stones at him. Fined 3s. 6d. for the first
offence, and 10s. and costs for the assault.


Glasgow Queen's Park Police Court. Before Baillie Norman Thompson.
John Kane pleaded guilty to assaulting his wife. There were five
previous convictions. Fined 2 pounds, 2s.


Taunton County Petty Sessions. John Painter, a big, burly fellow,
described as a labourer, charged with assaulting his wife. The
woman received two severe black eyes, and her face was badly
swollen. Fined 1 pound, 8s., including costs, and bound over to
keep the peace.


Widnes Police Court. Richard Bestwick and George Hunt, charged with
trespassing in search of game. Hunt fined 1 pound and costs,
Bestwick 2 pounds and costs; in default, one month.


Shaftesbury Police Court. Before the Mayor (Mr. A. T. Carpenter).
Thomas Baker, charged with sleeping out. Fourteen days.


Glasgow Central Police Court. Before Bailie Dunlop. Edward
Morrison, a lad, convicted of stealing fifteen pears from a lorry at
the railroad station. Seven days.


Doncaster Borough Police Court. Before Alderman Clark and other
magistrates. James M'Gowan, charged under the Poaching Prevention
Act with being found in possession of poaching implements and a
number of rabbits. Fined 2 pounds and costs, or one month.


Dunfermline Sheriff Court. Before Sheriff Gillespie. John Young, a
pit-head worker, pleaded guilty to assaulting Alexander Storrar by
beating him about the head and body with his fists, throwing him on
the ground, and also striking him with a pit prop. Fined 1 pound.


Kirkcaldy Police Court. Before Bailie Dishart. Simon Walker
pleaded guilty to assaulting a man by striking and knocking him
down. It was an unprovoked assault, and the magistrate described
the accused as a perfect danger to the community. Fined 30s.


Mansfield Police Court. Before the Mayor, Messrs. F. J. Turner, J.
Whitaker, F. Tidsbury, E. Holmes, and Dr. R. Nesbitt. Joseph
Jackson, charged with assaulting Charles Nunn. Without any
provocation, defendant struck the complainant a violent blow in the
face, knocking him down, and then kicked him on the side of the
head. He was rendered unconscious, and he remained under medical
treatment for a fortnight. Fined 21s.


Perth Sheriff Court. Before Sheriff Sym. David Mitchell, charged
with poaching. There were two previous convictions, the last being
three years ago. The sheriff was asked to deal leniently with
Mitchell, who was sixty-two years of age, and who offered no
resistance to the gamekeeper. Four months.


Dundee Sheriff Court. Before Hon. Sheriff-Substitute R. C. Walker.
John Murray, Donald Craig, and James Parkes, charged with poaching.
Craig and Parkes fined 1 pound each or fourteen days; Murray, 5
pounds or one month.


Reading Borough Police Court. Before Messrs. W. B. Monck, F. B.
Parfitt, H. M. Wallis, and G. Gillagan. Alfred Masters, aged
sixteen, charged with sleeping out on a waste piece of ground and
having no visible means of subsistence. Seven days.


Salisbury City Petty Sessions. Before the Mayor, Messrs. C.
Hoskins, G. Fullford, E. Alexander, and W. Marlow. James Moore,
charged with stealing a pair of boots from outside a shop. Twenty-
one days.


Horncastle Police Court. Before the Rev. W. F. Massingberd, the
Rev. J. Graham, and Mr. N. Lucas Calcraft. George Brackenbury, a
young labourer, convicted of what the magistrates characterised as
an altogether unprovoked and brutal assault upon James Sargeant
Foster, a man over seventy years of age. Fined 1 pound and 5s. 6d.
costs.


Worksop Petty Sessions. Before Messrs. F. J. S. Foljambe, R.
Eddison, and S. Smith. John Priestley, charged with assaulting the
Rev. Leslie Graham. Defendant, who was drunk, was wheeling a
perambulator and pushed it in front of a lorry, with the result that
the perambulator was overturned and the baby in it thrown out. The
lorry passed over the perambulator, but the baby was uninjured.
Defendant then attacked the driver of the lorry, and afterwards
assaulted the complainant, who remonstrated with him upon his
conduct. In consequence of the injuries defendant inflicted,
complainant had to consult a doctor. Fined 40s. and costs.


Rotherham West Riding Police Court. Before Messrs. C. Wright and G.
Pugh and Colonel Stoddart. Benjamin Storey, Thomas Brammer, and
Samuel Wilcock, charged with poaching. One month each.


Southampton County Police Court. Before Admiral J. C. Rowley, Mr.
H. H. Culme-Seymour, and other magistrates. Henry Thorrington,
charged with sleeping out. Seven days.


Eckington Police Court. Before Major L. B. Bowden, Messrs. R. Eyre,
and H. A. Fowler, and Dr. Court. Joseph Watts, charged with
stealing nine ferns from a garden. One month.


Ripley Petty Sessions. Before Messrs. J. B. Wheeler, W. D.
Bembridge, and M. Hooper. Vincent Allen and George Hall, charged
under the Poaching Prevention Act with being found in possession of
a number of rabbits, and John Sparham, charged with aiding and
abetting them. Hall and Sparham fined 1 pound, 17s. 4d., and Allen
2 pounds, 17s. 4d., including costs; the former committed for
fourteen days and the latter for one month in default of payment.


South-western Police Court, London. Before Mr. Rose. John Probyn,
charged with doing grievous bodily harm to a constable. Prisoner
had been kicking his wife, and also assaulting another woman who
protested against his brutality. The constable tried to persuade
him to go inside his house, but prisoner suddenly turned upon him,
knocking him down by a blow on the face, kicking him as he lay on
the ground, and attempting to strangle him. Finally the prisoner
deliberately kicked the officer in a dangerous part, inflicting an
injury which will keep him off duty for a long time to come. Six
weeks.


Lambeth Police Court, London. Before Mr. Hopkins. "Baby" Stuart,
aged nineteen, described as a chorus girl, charged with obtaining
food and lodging to the value of 5s. by false pretences, and with
intent to defraud Emma Brasier. Emma Brasier, complainant, lodging-
house keeper of Atwell Road. Prisoner took apartments at her house
on the representation that she was employed at the Crown Theatre.
After prisoner had been in her house two or three days, Mrs. Brasier
made inquiries, and, finding the girl's story untrue, gave her into
custody. Prisoner told the magistrate that she would have worked
had she not had such bad health. Six weeks' hard labour.

THE PEOPLE OF THE ABYSS

by Jack London






CHAPTER XII--CORONATION DAY



O thou that sea-walls sever
From lands unwalled by seas!
Wilt thou endure forever,
O Milton's England, these?
Thou that wast his Republic,
Wilt thou clasp their knees?
These royalties rust-eaten,
These worm-corroded lies
That keep thy head storm-beaten,
And sun-like strength of eyes
From the open air and heaven
Of intercepted skies!

- SWINBURNE.



Vivat Rex Eduardus! They crowned a king this day, and there has
been great rejoicing and elaborate tomfoolery, and I am perplexed
and saddened. I never saw anything to compare with the pageant,
except Yankee circuses and Alhambra ballets; nor did I ever see
anything so hopeless and so tragic.

To have enjoyed the Coronation procession, I should have come
straight from America to the Hotel Cecil, and straight from the
Hotel Cecil to a five-guinea seat among the washed. My mistake was
in coming from the unwashed of the East End. There were not many
who came from that quarter. The East End, as a whole, remained in
the East End and got drunk. The Socialists, Democrats, and
Republicans went off to the country for a breath of fresh air, quite
unaffected by the fact that four hundred millions of people were
taking to themselves a crowned and anointed ruler. Six thousand
five hundred prelates, priests, statesmen, princes, and warriors
beheld the crowning and anointing, and the rest of us the pageant as
it passed.

I saw it at Trafalgar Square, "the most splendid site in Europe,"
and the very innermost heart of the empire. There were many
thousands of us, all checked and held in order by a superb display
of armed power. The line of march was double-walled with soldiers.
The base of the Nelson Column was triple-fringed with bluejackets.
Eastward, at the entrance to the square, stood the Royal Marine
Artillery. In the triangle of Pall Mall and Cockspur Street, the
statue of George III. was buttressed on either side by the Lancers
and Hussars. To the west were the red-coats of the Royal Marines,
and from the Union Club to the embouchure of Whitehall swept the
glittering, massive curve of the 1st Life Guards--gigantic men
mounted on gigantic chargers, steel-breastplated, steel-helmeted,
steel-caparisoned, a great war-sword of steel ready to the hand of
the powers that be. And further, throughout the crowd, were flung
long lines of the Metropolitan Constabulary, while in the rear were
the reserves--tall, well-fed men, with weapons to wield and muscles
to wield them in ease of need.

And as it was thus at Trafalgar Square, so was it along the whole
line of march--force, overpowering force; myriads of men, splendid
men, the pick of the people, whose sole function in life is blindly
to obey, and blindly to kill and destroy and stamp out life. And
that they should be well fed, well clothed, and well armed, and have
ships to hurl them to the ends of the earth, the East End of London,
and the "East End" of all England, toils and rots and dies.

There is a Chinese proverb that if one man lives in laziness another
will die of hunger; and Montesquieu has said, "The fact that many
men are occupied in making clothes for one individual is the cause
of there being many people without clothes." So one explains the
other. We cannot understand the starved and runty {2} toiler of the
East End (living with his family in a one-room den, and letting out
the floor space for lodgings to other starved and runty toilers)
till we look at the strapping Life Guardsmen of the West End, and
come to know that the one must feed and clothe and groom the other.

And while in Westminster Abbey the people were taking unto
themselves a king, I, jammed between the Life Guards and
Constabulary of Trafalgar Square, was dwelling upon the time when
the people of Israel first took unto themselves a king. You all
know how it runs. The elders came to the prophet Samuel, and said:
"Make us a king to judge us like all the nations."


And the Lord said unto Samuel: Now therefore hearken unto their
voice; howbeit thou shalt show them the manner of the king that
shall reign over them.

And Samuel told all the words of the Lord unto the people that asked
of him a king, and he said:

This will be the manner of the king that shall reign over you; he
will take your sons, and appoint them unto him, for his chariots,
and to be his horsemen, and they shall run before his chariots.

And he will appoint them unto him for captains of thousands, and
captains of fifties; and he will set some to plough his ground, and
to reap his harvest, and to make his instruments of war, and the
instruments of his chariots.

And he will take your daughters to be confectionaries, and to be
cooks, and to be bakers.

And he will take your fields and your vineyards, and your
oliveyards, even the best of them, and give them to his servants.

And he will take a tenth of your seed, and of your vineyards, and
give to his officers, and to his servants.

And he will take your menservants, and your maidservants, and your
goodliest young men, and your asses, and put them to his work.

He will take a tenth of your flocks; and ye shall be his servants.

And ye shall call out in that day because of your king which ye
shall have chosen you; and the Lord will not answer you in that day.


All of which came to pass in that ancient day, and they did cry out
to Samuel, saying: "Pray for thy servants unto the Lord thy God,
that we die not; for we have added unto all our sins this evil, to
ask us a king." And after Saul, David, and Solomon, came Rehoboam,
who "answered the people roughly, saying: My father made your yoke
heavy, but I will add to your yoke; my father chastised you with
whips, but I will chastise you with scorpions."

And in these latter days, five hundred hereditary peers own one-
fifth of England; and they, and the officers and servants under the
King, and those who go to compose the powers that be, yearly spend
in wasteful luxury $1,850,000,000, or 370,000,000 pounds, which is
thirty-two per cent. of the total wealth produced by all the toilers
of the country.

At the Abbey, clad in wonderful golden raiment, amid fanfare of
trumpets and throbbing of music, surrounded by a brilliant throng of
masters, lords, and rulers, the King was being invested with the
insignia of his sovereignty. The spurs were placed to his heels by
the Lord Great Chamberlain, and a sword of state, in purple
scabbard, was presented him by the Archbishop of Canterbury, with
these words:-


Receive this kingly sword brought now from the altar of God, and
delivered to you by the hands of the bishops and servants of God,
though unworthy.


Whereupon, being girded, he gave heed to the Archbishop's
exhortation:-


With this sword do justice, stop the growth of iniquity, protect the
Holy Church of God, help and defend widows and orphans, restore the
things that are gone to decay, maintain the things that are
restored, punish and reform what is amiss, and confirm what is in
good order.


But hark! There is cheering down Whitehall; the crowd sways, the
double walls of soldiers come to attention, and into view swing the
King's watermen, in fantastic mediaeval garbs of red, for all the
world like the van of a circus parade. Then a royal carriage,
filled with ladies and gentlemen of the household, with powdered
footmen and coachmen most gorgeously arrayed. More carriages,
lords, and chamberlains, viscounts, mistresses of the robes--lackeys
all. Then the warriors, a kingly escort, generals, bronzed and
worn, from the ends of the earth come up to London Town, volunteer
officers, officers of the militia and regular forces; Spens and
Plumer, Broadwood and Cooper who relieved Ookiep, Mathias of Dargai,
Dixon of Vlakfontein; General Gaselee and Admiral Seymour of China;
Kitchener of Khartoum; Lord Roberts of India and all the world--the
fighting men of England, masters of destruction, engineers of death!
Another race of men from those of the shops and slums, a totally
different race of men.

But here they come, in all the pomp and certitude of power, and
still they come, these men of steel, these war lords and world
harnessers. Pell-mell, peers and commoners, princes and maharajahs,
Equerries to the King and Yeomen of the Guard. And here the
colonials, lithe and hardy men; and here all the breeds of all the
world-soldiers from Canada, Australia, New Zealand; from Bermuda,
Borneo, Fiji, and the Gold Coast; from Rhodesia, Cape Colony, Natal,
Sierra Leone and Gambia, Nigeria, and Uganda; from Ceylon, Cyprus,
Hong-Kong, Jamaica, and Wei-Hai-Wei; from Lagos, Malta, St. Lucia,
Singapore, Trinidad. And here the conquered men of Ind, swarthy
horsemen and sword wielders, fiercely barbaric, blazing in crimson
and scarlet, Sikhs, Rajputs, Burmese, province by province, and
caste by caste.

And now the Horse Guards, a glimpse of beautiful cream ponies, and a
golden panoply, a hurricane of cheers, the crashing of bands--"The
King! the King! God save the King!" Everybody has gone mad. The
contagion is sweeping me off my feet--I, too, want to shout, "The
King! God save the King!" Ragged men about me, tears in their
eyes, are tossing up their hats and crying ecstatically, "Bless 'em!
Bless 'em! Bless 'em!" See, there he is, in that wondrous golden
coach, the great crown flashing on his head, the woman in white
beside him likewise crowned.

And I check myself with a rush, striving to convince myself that it
is all real and rational, and not some glimpse of fairyland. This I
cannot succeed in doing, and it is better so. I much prefer to
believe that all this pomp, and vanity, and show, and mumbo-jumbo
foolery has come from fairyland, than to believe it the performance
of sane and sensible people who have mastered matter and solved the
secrets of the stars.

Princes and princelings, dukes, duchesses, and all manner of
coroneted folk of the royal train are flashing past; more warriors,
and lackeys, and conquered peoples, and the pagent is over. I drift
with the crowd out of the square into a tangle of narrow streets,
where the public-houses are a-roar with drunkenness, men, women, and
children mixed together in colossal debauch. And on every side is
rising the favourite song of the Coronation:-


"Oh! on Coronation Day, on Coronation Day,
We'll have a spree, a jubilee, and shout, Hip, hip, hooray,
For we'll all be marry, drinking whisky, wine, and sherry,
We'll all be merry on Coronation Day."


The rain is pouring down. Up the street come troops of the
auxiliaries, black Africans and yellow Asiatics, beturbaned and
befezed, and coolies swinging along with machine guns and mountain
batteries on their heads, and the bare feet of all, in quick rhythm,
going slish, slish, slish through the pavement mud. The public-
houses empty by magic, and the swarthy allegiants are cheered by
their British brothers, who return at once to the carouse.

"And how did you like the procession, mate?" I asked an old man on a
bench in Green Park.

"'Ow did I like it? A bloomin' good chawnce, sez I to myself, for a
sleep, wi' all the coppers aw'y, so I turned into the corner there,
along wi' fifty others. But I couldn't sleep, a-lyin' there an'
thinkin' 'ow I'd worked all the years o' my life an' now 'ad no
plyce to rest my 'ead; an' the music comin' to me, an' the cheers
an' cannon, till I got almost a hanarchist an' wanted to blow out
the brains o' the Lord Chamberlain."

Why the Lord Chamberlain I could not precisely see, nor could he,
but that was the way he felt, he said conclusively, and them was no
more discussion.

As night drew on, the city became a blaze of light. Splashes of
colour, green, amber, and ruby, caught the eye at every point, and
"E. R.," in great crystal letters and backed by flaming gas, was
everywhere. The crowds in the streets increased by hundreds of
thousands, and though the police sternly put down mafficking,
drunkenness and rough play abounded. The tired workers seemed to
have gone mad with the relaxation and excitement, and they surged
and danced down the streets, men and women, old and young, with
linked arms and in long rows, singing, "I may be crazy, but I love
you," "Dolly Gray," and "The Honeysuckle and the Bee"--the last
rendered something like this:-


"Yew aw the enny, ennyseckle, Oi em ther bee,
Oi'd like ter sip ther enny from those red lips, yew see."


I sat on a bench on the Thames Embankment, looking across the
illuminated water. It was approaching midnight, and before me
poured the better class of merrymakers, shunning the more riotous
streets and returning home. On the bench beside me sat two ragged
creatures, a man and a woman, nodding and dozing. The woman sat
with her arms clasped across the breast, holding tightly, her body
in constant play--now dropping forward till it seemed its balance
would be overcome and she would fall to the pavement; now inclining
to the left, sideways, till her head rested on the man's shoulder;
and now to the right, stretched and strained, till the pain of it
awoke her and she sat bolt upright. Whereupon the dropping forward
would begin again and go through its cycle till she was aroused by
the strain and stretch.

Every little while boys and young men stopped long enough to go
behind the bench and give vent to sudden and fiendish shouts. This
always jerked the man and woman abruptly from their sleep; and at
sight of the startled woe upon their faces the crowd would roar with
laughter as it flooded past.

This was the most striking thing, the general heartlessness
exhibited on every hand. It is a commonplace, the homeless on the
benches, the poor miserable folk who may be teased and are harmless.
Fifty thousand people must have passed the bench while I sat upon
it, and not one, on such a jubilee occasion as the crowning of the
King, felt his heart-strings touched sufficiently to come up and say
to the woman: "Here's sixpence; go and get a bed." But the women,
especially the young women, made witty remarks upon the woman
nodding, and invariably set their companions laughing.

To use a Briticism, it was "cruel"; the corresponding Americanism
was more appropriate--it was "fierce." I confess I began to grow
incensed at this happy crowd streaming by, and to extract a sort of
satisfaction from the London statistics which demonstrate that one
in every four adults is destined to die on public charity, either in
the workhouse, the infirmary, or the asylum.

I talked with the man. He was fifty-four and a broken-down docker.
He could only find odd work when there was a large demand for
labour, for the younger and stronger men were preferred when times
were slack. He had spent a week, now, on the benches of the
Embankment; but things looked brighter for next week, and he might
possibly get in a few days' work and have a bed in some doss-house.
He had lived all his life in London, save for five years, when, in
1878, he saw foreign service in India.

Of course he would eat; so would the girl. Days like this were
uncommon hard on such as they, though the coppers were so busy poor
folk could get in more sleep. I awoke the girl, or woman, rather,
for she was "Eyght an' twenty, sir," and we started for a coffee-
house.

"Wot a lot o' work puttin' up the lights," said the man at sight of
some building superbly illuminated. This was the keynote of his
being. All his fife he had worked, and the whole objective
universe, as well as his own soul, he could express in terms only of
work. "Coronations is some good," he went on. "They give work to
men."

"But your belly is empty," I said.

"Yes," he answered. "I tried, but there wasn't any chawnce. My age
is against me. Wot do you work at? Seafarin' chap, eh? I knew it
from yer clothes."

"I know wot you are," said the girl, "an Eyetalian."

"No 'e ayn't," the man cried heatedly. "'E's a Yank, that's wot 'e
is. I know."

"Lord lumne, look a' that," she exclaimed, as we debauched upon the
Strand, choked with the roaring, reeling Coronation crowd, the men
bellowing and the girls singing in high throaty notes:-


"Oh! on Coronation D'y, on Coronation D'y,
We'll 'ave a spree, a jubilee, an' shout 'Ip, 'ip, 'ooray;
For we'll all be merry, drinkin' whisky, wine, and sherry,
We'll all be merry on Coronation D'y."


"'Ow dirty I am, bein' around the w'y I 'ave," the woman said, as
she sat down in a coffee-house, wiping the sleep and grime from the
corners of her eyes. "An' the sights I 'ave seen this d'y, an' I
enjoyed it, though it was lonesome by myself. An' the duchesses an'
the lydies 'ad sich gran' w'ite dresses. They was jest bu'ful,
bu'ful."

"I'm Irish," she said, in answer to a question. "My nyme's
Eyethorne."

"What?" I asked.

"Eyethorne, sir; Eyethorne."

"Spell it."

"H-a-y-t-h-o-r-n-e, Eyethorne.'

"Oh," I said, "Irish Cockney."

"Yes, sir, London-born."

She had lived happily at home till her father died, killed in an
accident, when she had found herself on the world. One brother was
in the army, and the other brother, engaged in keeping a wife and
eight children on twenty shillings a week and unsteady employment,
could do nothing for her. She had been out of London once in her
life, to a place in Essex, twelve miles away, where she had picked
fruit for three weeks: "An' I was as brown as a berry w'en I come
back. You won't b'lieve it, but I was."

The last place in which she had worked was a coffee-house, hours
from seven in the morning till eleven at night, and for which she
had received five shillings a week and her food. Then she had
fallen sick, and since emerging from the hospital had been unable to
find anything to do. She wasn't feeling up to much, and the last
two nights had been spent in the street.

Between them they stowed away a prodigious amount of food, this man
and woman, and it was not till I had duplicated and triplicated
their original orders that they showed signs of easing down.

Once she reached across and felt the texture of my coat and shirt,
and remarked upon the good clothes the Yanks wore. My rags good
clothes! It put me to the blush; but, on inspecting them more
closely and on examining the clothes worn by the man and woman, I
began to feel quite well dressed and respectable.

"What do you expect to do in the end?" I asked them. "You know
you're growing older every day."

"Work'ouse," said he.

"Gawd blimey if I do," said she. "There's no 'ope for me, I know,
but I'll die on the streets. No work'ouse for me, thank you. No,
indeed," she sniffed in the silence that fell.

"After you have been out all night in the streets," I asked, "what
do you do in the morning for something to eat?"

"Try to get a penny, if you 'aven't one saved over," the man
explained. "Then go to a coffee-'ouse an' get a mug o' tea."

"But I don't see how that is to feed you," I objected.

The pair smiled knowingly.

"You drink your tea in little sips," he went on, "making it last its
longest. An' you look sharp, an' there's some as leaves a bit
be'ind 'em."

"It's s'prisin', the food wot some people leaves," the woman broke
in.

"The thing," said the man judicially, as the trick dawned upon me,
"is to get 'old o' the penny."

As we started to leave, Miss Haythorne gathered up a couple of
crusts from the neighbouring tables and thrust them somewhere into
her rags.

"Cawn't wyste 'em, you know," said she; to which the docker nodded,
tucking away a couple of crusts himself.

At three in the morning I strolled up the Embankment. It was a gala
night for the homeless, for the police were elsewhere; and each
bench was jammed with sleeping occupants. There were as many women
as men, and the great majority of them, male and female, were old.
Occasionally a boy was to be seen. On one bench I noticed a family,
a man sitting upright with a sleeping babe in his arms, his wife
asleep, her head on his shoulder, and in her lap the head of a
sleeping youngster. The man's eyes were wide open. He was staring
out over the water and thinking, which is not a good thing for a
shelterless man with a family to do. It would not be a pleasant
thing to speculate upon his thoughts; but this I know, and all
London knows, that the cases of out-of-works killing their wives and
babies is not an uncommon happening.

One cannot walk along the Thames Embankment, in the small hours of
morning, from the Houses of Parliament, past Cleopatra's Needle, to
Waterloo Bridge, without being reminded of the sufferings, seven and
twenty centuries old, recited by the author of "Job":-


There are that remove the landmarks; they violently take away flocks
and feed them.

They drive away the ass of the fatherless, they take the widow's ox
for a pledge.

They turn the needy out of the way; the poor of the earth hide
themselves together.

Behold, as wild asses in the desert they go forth to their work,
seeking diligently for meat; the wilderness yieldeth them food for
their children.

They cut their provender in the field, and they glean the vintage of
the wicked.

They lie all night naked without clothing, and have no covering in
the cold.

They are wet with the showers of the mountains, and embrace the rock
for want of a shelter.

There are that pluck the fatherless from the breast, and take a
pledge of the poor.

So that they go about naked without clothing, and being an hungered
they carry the sheaves.--Job xxiv. 2-10.


Seven and twenty centuries agone! And it is all as true and
apposite to-day in the innermost centre of this Christian
civilisation whereof Edward VII. is king.



CHAPTER XIII--DAN CULLEN, DOCKER



I stood, yesterday, in a room in one of the "Municipal Dwellings,"
not far from Leman Street. If I looked into a dreary future and saw
that I would have to live in such a room until I died, I should
immediately go down, plump into the Thames, and cut the tenancy
short.

It was not a room. Courtesy to the language will no more permit it
to be called a room than it will permit a hovel to be called a
mansion. It was a den, a lair. Seven feet by eight were its
dimensions, and the ceiling was so low as not to give the cubic air
space required by a British soldier in barracks. A crazy couch,
with ragged coverlets, occupied nearly half the room. A rickety
table, a chair, and a couple of boxes left little space in which to
turn around. Five dollars would have purchased everything in sight.
The floor was bare, while the walls and ceiling were literally
covered with blood marks and splotches. Each mark represented a
violent death--of an insect, for the place swarmed with vermin, a
plague with which no person could cope single-handed.

The man who had occupied this hole, one Dan Cullen, docker, was
dying in hospital. Yet he had impressed his personality on his
miserable surroundings sufficiently to give an inkling as to what
sort of man he was. On the walls were cheap pictures of Garibaldi,
Engels, Dan Burns, and other labour leaders, while on the table lay
one of Walter Besant's novels. He knew his Shakespeare, I was told,
and had read history, sociology, and economics. And he was self-
educated.

On the table, amidst a wonderful disarray, lay a sheet of paper on
which was scrawled: Mr. Cullen, please return the large white jug
and corkscrew I lent you--articles loaned, during the first stages
of his sickness, by a woman neighbour, and demanded back in
anticipation of his death. A large white jug and a corkscrew are
far too valuable to a creature of the Abyss to permit another
creature to die in peace. To the last, Dan Cullen's soul must be
harrowed by the sordidness out of which it strove vainly to rise.

It is a brief little story, the story of Dan Cullen, but there is
much to read between the lines. He was born lowly, in a city and
land where the lines of caste are tightly drawn. All his days he
toiled hard with his body; and because he had opened the books, and
been caught up by the fires of the spirit, and could "write a letter
like a lawyer," he had been selected by his fellows to toil hard for
them with his brain. He became a leader of the fruit-porters,
represented the dockers on the London Trades Council, and wrote
trenchant articles for the labour journals.

He did not cringe to other men, even though they were his economic
masters, and controlled the means whereby he lived, and he spoke his
mind freely, and fought the good fight. In the "Great Dock Strike"
he was guilty of taking a leading part. And that was the end of Dan
Cullen. From that day he was a marked man, and every day, for ten
years and more, he was "paid off" for what he had done.

A docker is a casual labourer. Work ebbs and flows, and he works or
does not work according to the amount of goods on hand to be moved.
Dan Cullen was discriminated against. While he was not absolutely
turned away (which would have caused trouble, and which would
certainly have been more merciful), he was called in by the foreman
to do not more than two or three days' work per week. This is what
is called being "disciplined," or "drilled." It means being
starved. There is no politer word. Ten years of it broke his
heart, and broken-hearted men cannot live.

He took to his bed in his terrible den, which grew more terrible
with his helplessness. He was without kith or kin, a lonely old
man, embittered and pessimistic, fighting vermin the while and
looking at Garibaldi, Engels, and Dan Burns gazing down at him from
the blood-bespattered walls. No one came to see him in that crowded
municipal barracks (he had made friends with none of them), and he
was left to rot.

But from the far reaches of the East End came a cobbler and his son,
his sole friends. They cleansed his room, brought fresh linen from
home, and took from off his limbs the sheets, greyish-black with
dirt. And they brought to him one of the Queen's Bounty nurses from
Aldgate.

She washed his face, shook up his conch, and talked with him. It
was interesting to talk with him--until he learned her name. Oh,
yes, Blank was her name, she replied innocently, and Sir George
Blank was her brother. Sir George Blank, eh? thundered old Dan
Cullen on his death-bed; Sir George Blank, solicitor to the docks at
Cardiff, who, more than any other man, had broken up the Dockers'
Union of Cardiff, and was knighted? And she was his sister?
Thereupon Dan Cullen sat up on his crazy couch and pronounced
anathema upon her and all her breed; and she fled, to return no
more, strongly impressed with the ungratefulness of the poor.

Dan Cullen's feet became swollen with dropsy. He sat up all day on
the side of the bed (to keep the water out of his body), no mat on
the floor, a thin blanket on his legs, and an old coat around his
shoulders. A missionary brought him a pair of paper slippers, worth
fourpence (I saw them), and proceeded to offer up fifty prayers or
so for the good of Dan Cullen's soul. But Dan Cullen was the sort
of man that wanted his soul left alone. He did not care to have
Tom, Dick, or Harry, on the strength of fourpenny slippers,
tampering with it. He asked the missionary kindly to open the
window, so that he might toss the slippers out. And the missionary
went away, to return no more, likewise impressed with the
ungratefulness of the poor.

The cobbler, a brave old hero himself, though unaneled and unsung,
went privily to the head office of the big fruit brokers for whom
Dan Cullen had worked as a casual labourer for thirty years. Their
system was such that the work was almost entirely done by casual
hands. The cobbler told them the man's desperate plight, old,
broken, dying, without help or money, reminded them that he had
worked for them thirty years, and asked them to do something for
him.

"Oh," said the manager, remembering Dan Cullen without having to
refer to the books, "you see, we make it a rule never to help
casuals, and we can do nothing."

Nor did they do anything, not even sign a letter asking for Dan
Cullen's admission to a hospital. And it is not so easy to get into
a hospital in London Town. At Hampstead, if he passed the doctors,
at least four months would elapse before he could get in, there were
so many on the books ahead of him. The cobbler finally got him into
the Whitechapel Infirmary, where he visited him frequently. Here he
found that Dan Cullen had succumbed to the prevalent feeling, that,
being hopeless, they were hurrying him out of the way. A fair and
logical conclusion, one must agree, for an old and broken man to
arrive at, who has been resolutely "disciplined" and "drilled" for
ten years. When they sweated him for Bright's disease to remove the
fat from the kidneys, Dan Cullen contended that the sweating was
hastening his death; while Bright's disease, being a wasting away of
the kidneys, there was therefore no fat to remove, and the doctor's
excuse was a palpable lie. Whereupon the doctor became wroth, and
did not come near him for nine days.

Then his bed was tilted up so that his feet and legs were elevated.
At once dropsy appeared in the body, and Dan Cullen contended that
the thing was done in order to run the water down into his body from
his legs and kill him more quickly. He demanded his discharge,
though they told him he would die on the stairs, and dragged
himself, more dead than alive, to the cobbler's shop. At the moment
of writing this, he is dying at the Temperance Hospital, into which
place his staunch friend, the cobbler, moved heaven and earth to
have him admitted.

Poor Dan Cullen! A Jude the Obscure, who reached out after
knowledge; who toiled with his body in the day and studied in the
watches of the night; who dreamed his dream and struck valiantly for
the Cause; a patriot, a lover of human freedom, and a fighter
unafraid; and in the end, not gigantic enough to beat down the
conditions which baffled and stifled him, a cynic and a pessimist,
gasping his final agony on a pauper's couch in a charity ward,--"For
a man to die who might have been wise and was not, this I call a
tragedy."

THE PEOPLE OF THE ABYSS

by Jack London






CHAPTER X--CARRYING THE BANNER



"To carry the banner" means to walk the streets all night; and I,
with the figurative emblem hoisted, went out to see what I could
see. Men and women walk the streets at night all over this great
city, but I selected the West End, making Leicester Square my base,
and scouting about from the Thames Embankment to Hyde Park.

The rain was falling heavily when the theatres let out, and the
brilliant throng which poured from the places of amusement was hard
put to find cabs. The streets were so many wild rivers of cabs,
most of which were engaged, however; and here I saw the desperate
attempts of ragged men and boys to get a shelter from the night by
procuring cabs for the cabless ladies and gentlemen. I use the word
"desperate" advisedly, for these wretched, homeless ones were
gambling a soaking against a bed; and most of them, I took notice,
got the soaking and missed the bed. Now, to go through a stormy
night with wet clothes, and, in addition, to be ill nourished and
not to have tasted meat for a week or a month, is about as severe a
hardship as a man can undergo. Well fed and well clad, I have
travelled all day with the spirit thermometer down to seventy-four
degrees below zero--one hundred and six degrees of frost {1}; and
though I suffered, it was a mere nothing compared with carrying the
banner for a night, ill fed, ill clad, and soaking wet.

The streets grew very quiet and lonely after the theatre crowd had
gone home. Only were to be seen the ubiquitous policemen, flashing
their dark lanterns into doorways and alleys, and men and women and
boys taking shelter in the lee of buildings from the wind and rain.
Piccadilly, however, was not quite so deserted. Its pavements were
brightened by well-dressed women without escort, and there was more
life and action there than elsewhere, due to the process of finding
escort. But by three o'clock the last of them had vanished, and it
was then indeed lonely.

At half-past one the steady downpour ceased, and only showers fell
thereafter. The homeless folk came away from the protection of the
buildings, and slouched up and down and everywhere, in order to rush
up the circulation and keep warm.

One old woman, between fifty and sixty, a sheer wreck, I had noticed
earlier in the night standing in Piccadilly, not far from Leicester
Square. She seemed to have neither the sense nor the strength to
get out of the rain or keep walking, but stood stupidly, whenever
she got the chance, meditating on past days, I imagine, when life
was young and blood was warm. But she did not get the chance often.
She was moved on by every policeman, and it required an average of
six moves to send her doddering off one man's beat and on to
another's. By three o'clock, she had progressed as far as St. James
Street, and as the clocks were striking four I saw her sleeping
soundly against the iron railings of Green Park. A brisk shower was
falling at the time, and she must have been drenched to the skin.

Now, said I, at one o'clock, to myself; consider that you are a poor
young man, penniless, in London Town, and that to-morrow you must
look for work. It is necessary, therefore, that you get some sleep
in order that you may have strength to look for work and to do work
in case you find it.

So I sat down on the stone steps of a building. Five minutes later
a policeman was looking at me. My eyes were wide open, so he only
grunted and passed on. Ten minutes later my head was on my knees, I
was dozing, and the same policeman was saying gruffly, "'Ere, you,
get outa that!"

I got. And, like the old woman, I continued to get; for every time
I dozed, a policeman was there to rout me along again. Not long
after, when I had given this up, I was walking with a young Londoner
(who had been out to the colonies and wished he were out to them
again), when I noticed an open passage leading under a building and
disappearing in darkness. A low iron gate barred the entrance.

"Come on," I said. "Let's climb over and get a good sleep."

"Wot?" he answered, recoiling from me. "An' get run in fer three
months! Blimey if I do!"

Later on I was passing Hyde Park with a young boy of fourteen or
fifteen, a most wretched-looking youth, gaunt and hollow-eyed and
sick.

"Let's go over the fence," I proposed, "and crawl into the shrubbery
for a sleep. The bobbies couldn't find us there."

"No fear," he answered. "There's the park guardians, and they'd run
you in for six months."

Times have changed, alas! When I was a youngster I used to read of
homeless boys sleeping in doorways. Already the thing has become a
tradition. As a stock situation it will doubtless linger in
literature for a century to come, but as a cold fact it has ceased
to be. Here are the doorways, and here are the boys, but happy
conjunctions are no longer effected. The doorways remain empty, and
the boys keep awake and carry the banner.

"I was down under the arches," grumbled another young fellow. By
"arches" he meant the shore arches where begin the bridges that span
the Thames. "I was down under the arches wen it was ryning its
'ardest, an' a bobby comes in an' chyses me out. But I come back,
an' 'e come too. ''Ere,' sez 'e, 'wot you doin' 'ere?' An' out I
goes, but I sez, 'Think I want ter pinch [steal] the bleedin'
bridge?'"

Among those who carry the banner, Green Park has the reputation of
opening its gates earlier than the other parks, and at quarter-past
four in the morning, I, and many more, entered Green Park. It was
raining again, but they were worn out with the night's walking, and
they were down on the benches and asleep at once. Many of the men
stretched out full length on the dripping wet grass, and, with the
rain falling steadily upon them, were sleeping the sleep of
exhaustion.

And now I wish to criticise the powers that be. They ARE the
powers, therefore they may decree whatever they please; so I make
bold only to criticise the ridiculousness of their decrees. All
night long they make the homeless ones walk up and down. They drive
them out of doors and passages, and lock them out of the parks. The
evident intention of all this is to deprive them of sleep. Well and
good, the powers have the power to deprive them of sleep, or of
anything else for that matter; but why under the sun do they open
the gates of the parks at five o'clock in the morning and let the
homeless ones go inside and sleep? If it is their intention to
deprive them of sleep, why do they let them sleep after five in the
morning? And if it is not their intention to deprive them of sleep,
why don't they let them sleep earlier in the night?

In this connection, I will say that I came by Green Park that same
day, at one in the afternoon, and that I counted scores of the
ragged wretches asleep in the grass. It was Sunday afternoon, the
sun was fitfully appearing, and the well-dressed West Enders, with
their wives and progeny, were out by thousands, taking the air. It
was not a pleasant sight for them, those horrible, unkempt, sleeping
vagabonds; while the vagabonds themselves, I know, would rather have
done their sleeping the night before.

And so, dear soft people, should you ever visit London Town, and see
these men asleep on the benches and in the grass, please do not
think they are lazy creatures, preferring sleep to work. Know that
the powers that be have kept them walking all the night long, and
that in the day they have nowhere else to sleep.



CHAPTER XI--THE PEG



But, after carrying the banner all night, I did not sleep in Green
Park when morning dawned. I was wet to the skin, it is true, and I
had had no sleep for twenty-four hours; but, still adventuring as a
penniless man looking for work, I had to look about me, first for a
breakfast, and next for the work.

During the night I had heard of a place over on the Surrey side of
the Thames, where the Salvation Army every Sunday morning gave away
a breakfast to the unwashed. (And, by the way, the men who carry
the banner are unwashed in the morning, and unless it is raining
they do not have much show for a wash, either.) This, thought I, is
the very thing--breakfast in the morning, and then the whole day in
which to look for work.

It was a weary walk. Down St. James Street I dragged my tired legs,
along Pall Mall, past Trafalgar Square, to the Strand. I crossed
the Waterloo Bridge to the Surrey side, cut across to Blackfriars
Road, coming out near the Surrey Theatre, and arrived at the
Salvation Army barracks before seven o'clock. This was "the peg."
And by "the peg," in the argot, is meant the place where a free meal
may be obtained.

Here was a motley crowd of woebegone wretches who had spent the
night in the rain. Such prodigious misery! and so much of it! Old
men, young men, all manner of men, and boys to boot, and all manner
of boys. Some were drowsing standing up; half a score of them were
stretched out on the stone steps in most painful postures, all of
them sound asleep, the skin of their bodies showing red through the
holes, and rents in their rags. And up and down the street and
across the street for a block either way, each doorstep had from two
to three occupants, all asleep, their heads bent forward on their
knees. And, it must be remembered, these are not hard times in
England. Things are going on very much as they ordinarily do, and
times are neither hard nor easy.

And then came the policeman. "Get outa that, you bloomin' swine!
Eigh! eigh! Get out now!" And like swine he drove them from the
doorways and scattered them to the four winds of Surrey. But when
he encountered the crowd asleep on the steps he was astounded.
"Shocking!" he exclaimed. "Shocking! And of a Sunday morning! A
pretty sight! Eigh! eigh! Get outa that, you bleeding nuisances!"

Of course it was a shocking sight, I was shocked myself. And I
should not care to have my own daughter pollute her eyes with such a
sight, or come within half a mile of it; but--and there we were, and
there you are, and "but" is all that can be said.

The policeman passed on, and back we clustered, like flies around a
honey jar. For was there not that wonderful thing, a breakfast,
awaiting us? We could not have clustered more persistently and
desperately had they been giving away million-dollar bank-notes.
Some were already off to sleep, when back came the policeman and
away we scattered only to return again as soon as the coast was
clear.

At half-past seven a little door opened, and a Salvation Army
soldier stuck out his head. "Ayn't no sense blockin' the wy up that
wy," he said. "Those as 'as tickets cawn come hin now, an' those as
'asn't cawn't come hin till nine."

Oh, that breakfast! Nine o'clock! An hour and a half longer! The
men who held tickets were greatly envied. They were permitted to go
inside, have a wash, and sit down and rest until breakfast, while we
waited for the same breakfast on the street. The tickets had been
distributed the previous night on the streets and along the
Embankment, and the possession of them was not a matter of merit,
but of chance.

At eight-thirty, more men with tickets were admitted, and by nine
the little gate was opened to us. We crushed through somehow, and
found ourselves packed in a courtyard like sardines. On more
occasions than one, as a Yankee tramp in Yankeeland, I have had to
work for my breakfast; but for no breakfast did I ever work so hard
as for this one. For over two hours I had waited outside, and for
over another hour I waited in this packed courtyard. I had had
nothing to eat all night, and I was weak and faint, while the smell
of the soiled clothes and unwashed bodies, steaming from pent animal
heat, and blocked solidly about me, nearly turned my stomach. So
tightly were we packed, that a number of the men took advantage of
the opportunity and went soundly asleep standing up.

Now, about the Salvation Army in general I know nothing, and
whatever criticism I shall make here is of that particular portion
of the Salvation Army which does business on Blackfriars Road near
the Surrey Theatre. In the first place, this forcing of men who
have been up all night to stand on their feet for hours longer, is
as cruel as it is needless. We were weak, famished, and exhausted
from our night's hardship and lack of sleep, and yet there we stood,
and stood, and stood, without rhyme or reason.

Sailors were very plentiful in this crowd. It seemed to me that one
man in four was looking for a ship, and I found at least a dozen of
them to be American sailors. In accounting for their being "on the
beach," I received the same story from each and all, and from my
knowledge of sea affairs this story rang true. English ships sign
their sailors for the voyage, which means the round trip, sometimes
lasting as long as three years; and they cannot sign off and receive
their discharges until they reach the home port, which is England.
Their wages are low, their food is bad, and their treatment worse.
Very often they are really forced by their captains to desert in the
New World or the colonies, leaving a handsome sum of wages behind
them--a distinct gain, either to the captain or the owners, or to
both. But whether for this reason alone or not, it is a fact that
large numbers of them desert. Then, for the home voyage, the ship
engages whatever sailors it can find on the beach. These men are
engaged at the somewhat higher wages that obtain in other portions
of the world, under the agreement that they shall sign off on
reaching England. The reason for this is obvious; for it would be
poor business policy to sign them for any longer time, since
seamen's wages are low in England, and England is always crowded
with sailormen on the beach. So this fully accounted for the
American seamen at the Salvation Army barracks. To get off the
beach in other outlandish places they had come to England, and gone
on the beach in the most outlandish place of all.

There were fully a score of Americans in the crowd, the non-sailors
being "tramps royal," the men whose "mate is the wind that tramps
the world." They were all cheerful, facing things with the pluck
which is their chief characteristic and which seems never to desert
them, withal they were cursing the country with lurid metaphors
quite refreshing after a month of unimaginative, monotonous Cockney
swearing. The Cockney has one oath, and one oath only, the most
indecent in the language, which he uses on any and every occasion.
Far different is the luminous and varied Western swearing, which
runs to blasphemy rather than indecency. And after all, since men
will swear, I think I prefer blasphemy to indecency; there is an
audacity about it, an adventurousness and defiance that is better
than sheer filthiness.

There was one American tramp royal whom I found particularly
enjoyable. I first noticed him on the street, asleep in a doorway,
his head on his knees, but a hat on his head that one does not meet
this side of the Western Ocean. When the policeman routed him out,
he got up slowly and deliberately, looked at the policeman, yawned
and stretched himself, looked at the policeman again as much as to
say he didn't know whether he would or wouldn't, and then sauntered
leisurely down the sidewalk. At the outset I was sure of the hat,
but this made me sure of the wearer of the hat.

In the jam inside I found myself alongside of him, and we had quite
a chat. He had been through Spain, Italy, Switzerland, and France,
and had accomplished the practically impossible feat of beating his
way three hundred miles on a French railway without being caught at
the finish. Where was I hanging out? he asked. And how did I
manage for "kipping"?--which means sleeping. Did I know the rounds
yet? He was getting on, though the country was "horstyl" and the
cities were "bum." Fierce, wasn't it? Couldn't "batter" (beg)
anywhere without being "pinched." But he wasn't going to quit it.
Buffalo Bill's Show was coming over soon, and a man who could drive
eight horses was sure of a job any time. These mugs over here
didn't know beans about driving anything more than a span. What was
the matter with me hanging on and waiting for Buffalo Bill? He was
sure I could ring in somehow.

And so, after all, blood is thicker than water. We were fellow-
countrymen and strangers in a strange land. I had warmed to his
battered old hat at sight of it, and he was as solicitous for my
welfare as if we were blood brothers. We swapped all manner of
useful information concerning the country and the ways of its
people, methods by which to obtain food and shelter and what not,
and we parted genuinely sorry at having to say good-bye.

One thing particularly conspicuous in this crowd was the shortness
of stature. I, who am but of medium height, looked over the heads
of nine out of ten. The natives were all short, as were the foreign
sailors. There were only five or six in the crowd who could be
called fairly tall, and they were Scandinavians and Americans. The
tallest man there, however, was an exception. He was an Englishman,
though not a Londoner. "Candidate for the Life Guards," I remarked
to him. "You've hit it, mate," was his reply; "I've served my bit
in that same, and the way things are I'll be back at it before
long."

For an hour we stood quietly in this packed courtyard. Then the men
began to grow restless. There was pushing and shoving forward, and
a mild hubbub of voices. Nothing rough, however, nor violent;
merely the restlessness of weary and hungry men. At this juncture
forth came the adjutant. I did not like him. His eyes were not
good. There was nothing of the lowly Galilean about him, but a
great deal of the centurion who said: "For I am a man in authority,
having soldiers under me; and I say to this man, Go, and he goeth;
and to another, Come, and he cometh; and to my servant, Do this, and
he doeth it."

Well, he looked at us in just that way, and those nearest to him
quailed. Then he lifted his voice.

"Stop this 'ere, now, or I'll turn you the other wy an' march you
out, an' you'll get no breakfast."

I cannot convey by printed speech the insufferable way in which he
said this. He seemed to me to revel in that he was a man in
authority, able to say to half a thousand ragged wretches, "you may
eat or go hungry, as I elect."

To deny us our breakfast after standing for hours! It was an awful
threat, and the pitiful, abject silence which instantly fell
attested its awfulness. And it was a cowardly threat. We could not
strike back, for we were starving; and it is the way of the world
that when one man feeds another he is that man's master. But the
centurion--I mean the adjutant--was not satisfied. In the dead
silence he raised his voice again, and repeated the threat, and
amplified it.

At last we were permitted to enter the feasting hall, where we found
the "ticket men" washed but unfed. All told, there must have been
nearly seven hundred of us who sat down--not to meat or bread, but
to speech, song, and prayer. From all of which I am convinced that
Tantalus suffers in many guises this side of the infernal regions.
The adjutant made the prayer, but I did not take note of it, being
too engrossed with the massed picture of misery before me. But the
speech ran something like this: "You will feast in Paradise. No
matter how you starve and suffer here, you will feast in Paradise,
that is, if you will follow the directions." And so forth and so
forth. A clever bit of propaganda, I took it, but rendered of no
avail for two reasons. First, the men who received it were
unimaginative and materialistic, unaware of the existence of any
Unseen, and too inured to hell on earth to be frightened by hell to
come. And second, weary and exhausted from the night's
sleeplessness and hardship, suffering from the long wait upon their
feet, and faint from hunger, they were yearning, not for salvation,
but for grub. The "soul-snatchers" (as these men call all religious
propagandists), should study the physiological basis of psychology a
little, if they wish to make their efforts more effective.

All in good time, about eleven o'clock, breakfast arrived. It
arrived, not on plates, but in paper parcels. I did not have all I
wanted, and I am sure that no man there had all he wanted, or half
of what he wanted or needed. I gave part of my bread to the tramp
royal who was waiting for Buffalo Bill, and he was as ravenous at
the end as he was in the beginning. This is the breakfast: two
slices of bread, one small piece of bread with raisins in it and
called "cake," a wafer of cheese, and a mug of "water bewitched."
Numbers of the men had been waiting since five o'clock for it, while
all of us had waited at least four hours; and in addition, we had
been herded like swine, packed like sardines, and treated like curs,
and been preached at, and sung to, and prayed for. Nor was that
all.

No sooner was breakfast over (and it was over almost as quickly as
it takes to tell), than the tired heads began to nod and droop, and
in five minutes half of us were sound asleep. There were no signs
of our being dismissed, while there were unmistakable signs of
preparation for a meeting. I looked at a small clock hanging on the
wall. It indicated twenty-five minutes to twelve. Heigh-ho,
thought I, time is flying, and I have yet to look for work.

"I want to go," I said to a couple of waking men near me.

"Got ter sty fer the service," was the answer.

"Do you want to stay?" I asked.

They shook their heads.

"Then let us go and tell them we want to get out," I continued.
"Come on."

But the poor creatures were aghast. So I left them to their fate,
and went up to the nearest Salvation Army man.

"I want to go," I said. "I came here for breakfast in order that I
might be in shape to look for work. I didn't think it would take so
long to get breakfast. I think I have a chance for work in Stepney,
and the sooner I start, the better chance I'll have of getting it."

He was really a good fellow, though he was startled by my request.
"Wy," he said, "we're goin' to 'old services, and you'd better sty."

"But that will spoil my chances for work," I urged. "And work is
the most important thing for me just now."

As he was only a private, he referred me to the adjutant, and to the
adjutant I repeated my reasons for wishing to go, and politely
requested that he let me go.

"But it cawn't be done," he said, waxing virtuously indignant at
such ingratitude. "The idea!" he snorted. "The idea!"

"Do you mean to say that I can't get out of here?" I demanded.
"That you will keep me here against my will?"

"Yes," he snorted.

I do not know what might have happened, for I was waxing indignant
myself; but the "congregation" had "piped" the situation, and he
drew me over to a corner of the room, and then into another room.
Here he again demanded my reasons for wishing to go.

"I want to go," I said, "because I wish to look for work over in
Stepney, and every hour lessens my chance of finding work. It is
now twenty-five minutes to twelve. I did not think when I came in
that it would take so long to get a breakfast."

"You 'ave business, eh?" he sneered. "A man of business you are,
eh? Then wot did you come 'ere for?"

"I was out all night, and I needed a breakfast in order to
strengthen me to find work. That is why I came here."

"A nice thing to do," he went on in the same sneering manner. "A
man with business shouldn't come 'ere. You've tyken some poor man's
breakfast 'ere this morning, that's wot you've done."

Which was a lie, for every mother's son of us had come in.

Now I submit, was this Christian-like, or even honest?--after I had
plainly stated that I was homeless and hungry, and that I wished to
look for work, for him to call my looking for work "business," to
call me therefore a business man, and to draw the corollary that a
man of business, and well off, did not require a charity breakfast,
and that by taking a charity breakfast I had robbed some hungry waif
who was not a man of business.

I kept my temper, but I went over the facts again, and clearly and
concisely demonstrated to him how unjust he was and how he had
perverted the facts. As I manifested no signs of backing down (and
I am sure my eyes were beginning to snap), he led me to the rear of
the building where, in an open court, stood a tent. In the same
sneering tone he informed a couple of privates standing there that
"'ere is a fellow that 'as business an' 'e wants to go before
services."

They were duly shocked, of course, and they looked unutterable
horror while he went into the tent and brought out the major. Still
in the same sneering manner, laying particular stress on the
"business," he brought my case before the commanding officer. The
major was of a different stamp of man. I liked him as soon as I saw
him, and to him I stated my case in the same fashion m before.

"Didn't you know you had to stay for services?" he asked.

"Certainly not," I answered, "or I should have gone without my
breakfast. You have no placards posted to that effect, nor was I so
informed when I entered the place."

He meditated a moment. "You can go," he said.

It was twelve o'clock when I gained the street, and I couldn't quite
make up my mind whether I had been in the army or in prison. The
day was half gone, and it was a far fetch to Stepney. And besides,
it was Sunday, and why should even a starving man look for work on
Sunday? Furthermore, it was my judgment that I had done a hard
night's work walking the streets, and a hard day's work getting my
breakfast; so I disconnected myself from my working hypothesis of a
starving young man in search of employment, hailed a bus, and
climbed aboard.

After a shave and a bath, with my clothes all off, I got in between
clean white sheets and went to sleep. It was six in the evening
when I closed my eyes. When they opened again, the clocks were
striking nine next morning. I had slept fifteen straight hours.
And as I lay there drowsily, my mind went back to the seven hundred
unfortunates I had left waiting for services. No bath, no shave for
them, no clean white sheets and all clothes off, and fifteen hours'
straight sleep. Services over, it was the weary streets again, the
problem of a crust of bread ere night, and the long sleepless night
in the streets, and the pondering of the problem of how to obtain a
crust at dawn.