, the perambulating carcasses, the
living deaths--women, blasted by disease and drink till their shame
brought not tuppence in the open mart; and men, in fantastic rags,
wrenched by hardship and exposure out of all semblance of men, their
faces in a perpetual writhe of pain, grinning idiotically, shambling like
apes, dying with every step they took and each breath they drew. And
there were young girls, of eighteen and twenty, with trim bodies and
faces yet untouched with twist and bloat, who had fetched the bottom of
the Abyss plump, in one swift fall. And I remember a lad of fourteen,
and one of six or seven, white-faced and sickly, homeless, the pair of
them, who sat upon the pavement with their backs against a railing and
watched it all.

The unfit and the unneeded! Industry does not clamour for them. There
are no jobs going begging through lack of men and women. The dockers
crowd at the entrance gate, and curse and turn away when the foreman does
not give them a call. The engineers who have work pay six shillings a
week to their brother engineers who can find nothing to do; 514,000
textile workers oppose a resolution condemning the employment of children
under fifteen. Women, and plenty to spare, are found to toil under the
sweat-shop masters for tenpence a day of fourteen hours. Alfred Freeman
crawls to muddy death because he loses his job. Ellen Hughes Hunt
prefers Regent's Canal to Islington Workhouse. Frank Cavilla cuts the
throats of his wife and children because he cannot find work enough to
give them food and shelter.

The unfit and the unneeded! The miserable and despised and forgotten,
dying in the social shambles. The progeny of prostitution--of the
prostitution of men and women and children, of flesh and blood, and
sparkle and spirit; in brief, the prostitution of labour. If this is the
best that civilisation can do for the human, then give us howling and
naked savagery. Far better to be a people of the wilderness and desert,
of the cave and the squatting-place, than to be a people of the machine
and the Abyss.

CHAPTER XXV--THE HUNGER WAIL

"My father has more stamina than I, for he is country-born."

The speaker, a bright young East Ender, was lamenting his poor physical
development.

"Look at my scrawny arm, will you." He pulled up his sleeve. "Not
enough to eat, that's what's the matter with it. Oh, not now. I have
what I want to eat these days. But it's too late. It