These Asiatics of the East End are a strange and motley crew; brought in by every steamer, every heavily-cargoed ship from the East, every trader "dropping down with costly bales." On the largest ships, say those of the P. and O. Company, vessels of some 7,000 tons, there will be perhaps some 120 Orientals on board, and, with such contingents continually arriving, there is, naturally, in the East End, a large foreign, though ever-shifting, population. Curious are the corruptions of Indian words one hears, and strange indeed are the sights and sounds among Malays, Chinese, and Indians. The famous opium dens of the East End, turned to such dramatic account not only in Dickens's Edwin Drood, but also, at a later day, in the Sherlock Holmes sequence of stories, are now much restricted in their horrors by police supervision. They used to be devils' haunts, famed for robbery and vice—traps set to catch the unwary Asiatic; but missionary work, combined with the clearances made by the East London Railway, has effected great improvement in the opium den of to-day. In the words of the writer before-mentioned:
"It looks like a private house, and no noise is permitted, for it is necessary to keep it as private as possible to prevent police interference. For they are invariably gambling dens also, and the Asiatic who goes to gamble still burns his joss-stick before the idol set up inside, in order to propitiate his deity and get good luck. Though repellant in appearance, there is a certain picturesqueness about the interior of these places. The shrine stands just inside the door, and there is a pungent odour from the ever-burning incense, while vases of artificial flowers, mingling among such queer votive offerings as biscuits and cups of tea, give it a strange appearance. The Canton matting, which is largely used in the rooms, gives a little local colour, and the personnel of the place is of a decided polyglot order. You may possibly see one or two men lying about sleeping off the results of their opium debauch: but gambling seems to be the main feature."
Nevertheless, even in these "reformed" dens, the home-coming sailor, or the imprudent Lascar, may find himself tempted to his undoing and "cleaned out" of all his hard-won earnings. Or he may possibly be "knifed," and, if the criminal escape, in this region of obscure and unknown "byways," even the experienced police may be hard set to find him. It is, indeed, a true "Vanity Fair," this East End of London, for poor Christian and Faithful, fresh from the sea and all its dangers.
The Yiddish colony is also a city by itself. The Jews who foregather in Whitechapel are mostly of Polish, Russian, or German extraction, and their talk, to unused ears, sounds like a strange German lingo, unpleasantly whined through the nose. Indeed, it closely resembles German; the word "Yiddish" itself being but a corruption of the German "Jüdisch," or Jewish. These people, whose "interpreters" figure largely at nearly every police-court brawl in Whitechapel, Shoreditch, and Spitalfields, may be said to be a law and a dispensation to themselves. They crowd, in their numbers, into dirty tenement houses, in yet dirtier streets; streets in which they barter, buy and sell with all the instinct and all the indomitable energy of their race. Here are the tailors' sweating dens, so often deplored by philanthropic "commissions"; here human toil is reduced, for the benefit of the "middleman," to its lowest possible price. The so-called "Jewish slave-market," to the existence of which attention has been called in the Press, is a strange and unpleasing custom. Here the Jewish "slave-owner" is, more or less, in the place of the Italian "padrone" already referred to, in that he imports human material, and "farms out" human labour:
"Any one who devotes a Sunday or two to visiting the open-air markets in the Jewish quarter, will have noticed on the fringe of the markets groups of men, sometimes with women and children. If you are under the convoy of a Jewish acquaintance who 'knows the ropes,' he will tell you that it is a 'hiring fair.' But it has a suspiciously close approximation to a slave market."
Leases of human labour, sold, at starvation wages for the victims, to the highest bidder, are not unnatural to a slum Yiddish population whose whole life is spent in barter. The Jewish colony in the East End now numbers some 35,000 souls:
"Only recently Lord Rothschild described it as a 'new Poland,' and said that it was the business of the nation 'first to humanise it and then Anglicise it.' It certainly wants humanising."
The cosmopolitanism of London tends to draw to it the sweepings, as well as the choice spirits,—the worst, as well as the best,—of all other nations and climes. "Hell is a city much like London," said the poet Shelley; and he spoke truth. Views, religious and otherwise, differ largely as to what Hell may be; one opinion, however, may be safely hazarded; that it will at any rate be cosmopolitan.