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.