St. Paul's.

The East End, strangely enough, appealed to him more than the West. He
took expeditions down among the docks, and sat in squalid public-houses
listening to the coarse conversation of their habitues. There was always
something new to shock, or interest, the eyes. It was no strange thing to
find a woman performing certain domestic avocations before a pot of beer.
Some of them brought potatoes and peas, peeling and shelling these in the
bar in preference to the hovels which they inhabited. The "pub" was their
club and general meeting-house.

Once he managed to get into conversation with one of these products of
"the hub of the Universe." Her point of view staggered him. Her meek
acceptance of her lot sickened him. Why didn't she fly--she and her
man--away to green fields and fresh air, away from this plague-ridden,
dismal city? The suggestion brought from her a peal of mirthless laughter.
Later he arrived at the truth. These people suffered from the greatest
disease of all--_The Fear of Living_. Their hearts were rotten. They lived
and died, rooted to some few acres of mud and muck because they feared
what lay beyond. Like children they feared the unknown. Daylight lay
beyond the jungle, but they believed it to be the pit of doom--of empty
stomachs and endless tribulation.

Nothing could be done for them until the system was smashed.
Unsophisticated, uncultured as he was, he succeeded in grasping the root
of the problem--Education. They were living a lie. The very environment
conspired to perpetuate that lie. When one among them stood up and averred
that Life meant something more than this, that Man was not made to eke out
his life in bitter misery, that the result of the toil of the worker was
filched by some inexplicable process, he was immediately voted "balmy."
They were not ripe for fighting. There was as yet no clearly seen Cause
that would rouse them from their torpor. But one day the flood would burst
the dam of besotted ignorance, and the human cataract would descend with
appalling force.

Colorado Jim, born out of Nature, succored by the sweet winds of heaven,
was learning things. When at nights he stood at his window, at the top of
the hotel, and gazed over the vastness of this squat monster, London,
Colorado seemed very far away.

Hitherto he had been a poor reader; he had had no time for books. Now a
book came into his hands. Feeling lonely, he dipped into it. It was
Reade's "Martyrdom of Man