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.

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