WOMEN IN THE METROPOLIS OF THE WORLD
"Have you any reverence for womanhood? Are you men? If you come here and look upon these women, you shall feel a burning scorn for the blazoned lies of English chivalry and English piety and English Art.
"Drudging here in these vile stews day after day, night after night; always with the wolf on the poor doorstep gnashing his fangs for the clinging brood; always with the black future, like an ominous cloud casting its chill shadow on their anxious hearts; always with the mean walls hemming them in, and the mean tasks wearing them down, and the mean life paralysing their souls; often with brutal husbands to coax and wait upon and fear; often with loafing blackguards—our poor brothers—living on their earnings; with work scarce, with wages low, in vile surroundings, and with faint hopes ever narrowing, these London women face the unrelenting, never-ceasing tide of inglorious war.
"If you go there and look upon these women, you will feel suddenly stricken old. Look at their mean and meagre dress, look at their warped figures, their furrowed brows, their dim eyes. In how many cases are the poor features battered, and the poor skins bruised? What culture have these women ever known; what teaching have they had; what graces of life have come to them; what dowry of love, of joy, of fair imagination? As I went amongst them through the mud and rain, as I watched them plying their needles on slop-garments, slaving at the wash-tub, gossiping or bandying foul jests in their balcony cages, drinking at the bars with the men—the thought that rose up most distinctly in my mind was, 'What would these poor creatures do without the gin?'
"The gin—that hellish liquor which blurs the hideous picture of life, which stills the gnawing pain, which stays the crushing hand of despair, and blunts the grinding teeth of anguish when the child lies dead of the rickets, or the 'sticks' are sold for the rent, or the sweater has no more work to give, or the husband has beaten and kicked the weary flesh black and blue! What would they do, these women, were it not for the Devil's usury of peace—the gin?
"My companion took me to a bridge across a kind of dock, and told me it was known thereabouts as 'The Bridge of Sighs.' There is a constable there on fixed-point duty. Why? To prevent the women from committing suicide. The suicides were so numerous, he said, that special precautions had to be taken. And since the constable has been set there, so eager are the women to quit this best of all possible worlds that they have been known to come there at night with a couple of women friends, and to leap into the deep, still water while those friends engaged the constable in conversation.
"Do you understand it? The woman has been wronged until she can endure no more; she has sunk till she can struggle no longer; she has been beaten and degraded until she loathes her life—even gin has ceased to buy a respite; or she is too poor to pay for gin, and she drags her broken soul and worn-out body to the Bridge of Sighs, and her friends come down to help her to escape from the misery which is too great for flesh and blood to bear. It is a pretty picture, is it not? While our sweet ladies are sighing in the West End theatre over the imaginary sorrows of a Manon Lescaut or repeating at church, with genteel reserve, the prayer for 'all weak women and young children'—here to the Bridge of Sighs comes the battered drudge, to seek for death as for a hidden treasure, and rejoice exceedingly because she has found a grave."
Many of these poor women, perhaps most, are mothers. What kind of environment, what land of stamina can they give their children?
"Take care of the women, and the nation will take care of itself." Here is another sketch from the life, taken in the chain and nail-making districts of Staffordshire.