ere old. At
church the sermons were not for the servants but for the masters; yet
the former were reminded every week of the Ten Commandments, which
were not only written out large for all to see, but were read out for
their instruction every Sunday morning. The decay of authority is one
of the distinguishing features of the present century.

But in Riverside London there were no masters, and there was no
authority for the great mass of the people. The sailor ashore had no
master; the men who worked on the lighters and on the ships had no
master except for the day; the ignoble horde of those who supplied the
coarse pleasures of the sailors had no masters; they were not made to
do anything but what they pleased; the church was not for them; their
children were not sent to school; their only masters were the fear of
the gallows, constantly before their eyes at Execution Dock and on the
shores of the Isle of Dogs, and their profound respect for the cat o'
nine tails. They knew no morality; they had no other restraint; they
all together slid, ran, fell, leaped, danced, and rolled swiftly and
easily adown the Primrose Path; they fell into a savagery the like of
which has never been known among English-folk since the days of their
conversion to the Christian faith. It is only by searching and poking
among unknown pamphlets and forgotten books that one finds out the
actual depths of the English savagery of the last century. And it is
not too much to say that for drunkenness, brutality, and ignorance,
the Englishman of the baser kind touched about the lowest depth ever
reached by civilized man during the last century. What he was in
Riverside London has been disclosed by Colquhoun, the Police
Magistrate. Here he was not only a drunkard, a brawler, a torturer of
dumb beasts, a wife-beater, a profligate--he was also, with his
fellows, engaged every day, and all day long, in a vast systematic
organized depredation. The people of the riverside were all, to a man,
river pirates; by day and by night they stole from the ships. There
were often as many as a thousand vessels lying in the river; there
were many hundreds of boats, barges, and lighters engaged upon their
cargoes, They practised their robberies in a thousand ingenious ways;
they weighed the anchors and stole them; they cut adrift lighters when
they were loaded, and when they had floated down the river they
pillaged what they could carry and left the rest to sink or swim; th