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