Mankind, as we know, in the lump is bad, but that it is not worse remains the everlasting wonder. It is not the squalor of such a crowd that should astonish; it is the marvel that they are not more squalid. For, after all, what is the root cause of all this dirt and ignorance and shabbiness and disease? It is not drink, nor thriftlessness, nor immorality, as the philanthropists do vainly talk; still less is it crime. It is the "inequality" of which Canon Barnett has often written—the inequality that Matthew Arnold said made a high civilisation impossible. But such inequality is only another name for poverty, and from poverty we have yet to discover the saviour who will redeem us.
X
THE GREAT UNKNOWN
There are strange regions where the monotony of ignoble streets is broken only by an occasional church, a Board School, or a public-house. From the city's cathedral to every point of the compass, except the west, they stretch almost without limit till they reach the bedraggled fields maturing for development. They form by far the larger part of an Empire's capital. Each of them is, in fact, a vast town, great enough, as far as numbers go, to make the Metropolis of a powerful State. Out of half a dozen of them, such as Islington, Bethnal Green, or Bermondsey, the County Council could build half a score of Italian republics like the Florence or Pisa of old days, if only it had the mind. Each possesses a character, a peculiar flavour, or, at the worst, a separate smell. Many of them are traversed every day by thousands of rich and well-educated people, passing underground or overhead. Yet to nearly all of us they remain strange and almost untrodden. We do not think of them when we think of London. Them no pleasure-seeker counts among his opportunities, no foreigner visits as essential for his study of the English soul. Not even our literary men and Civil Servants, who talk so much about architecture, discuss their architecture in the clubs. Not one in a thousand of us has ever known a human soul among their inhabitants. To the comfortable classes the Libyan desert is more familiar.
At elections, even politicians remember their existence. From time to time a philanthropist goes down there to share God's good gifts with his poorer brethren, or to elevate the masses with tinkling sounds or painted boards. From time to time an adventurous novelist is led round the opium-shops, dancing-saloons, and docks, returning with copy for tales of lust and murder that might just as well be laid in Siberia or Timbuctoo. When we scent an East End story on its way, do we not patiently await the battered head, the floating corpse, the dynamiter's den, or a woman crying over her ill-begotten babe? Do we not always get one or other of the lot? To read our story-tellers from Mr. Kipling downward, one might suppose the East End to be inhabited by bastards engaged in mutual murder, and the marvel is that anyone is left alive to be the subject of a tale. You may not bring an indictment against a whole nation, but no sensational writer hesitates to libel three million of our fellow-citizens. Put it in Whitechapel, and you may tell what filthy lie you please.
About once in a generation some "Bitter Cry" pierces through custom, and the lives of "the poor" become a subject for polite conversation and amateur solicitude. For three months, or even for six, that subject appears as the intellectual "rôti" at dinner-tables; then it is found a little heavy, and cultured interest returns to its natural courses of plays, pictures, politics, a dancing woman, and the memorials of Kings. It is almost time now that the poor came up again, for a quarter of a century has gone since they were last in fashion, and men's collars and women's skirts have run their full orbit since. Excellent books have appeared, written with intimate knowledge of working life—books such as Charles Booth's London or Mr. Richard Free's Seven Years Hard, to mention only two; but either the public mind was preoccupied with other amusements, or it had not recovered from the lassitude of the last philanthropic debauch. Nothing has roused that fury of charitable curiosity which accompanies a true social revival, and leaves its victims gasping for the next excitement. The time was, perhaps, ripe, but no startling success awaited Mr. Alexander Paterson's book, Across the Bridges. Excellent though it was, its excellence excluded it from fashion. For it was written with the restraint of knowledge, and contained no touch of melodrama from beginning to end. Not by knowledge or restraint are the insensate sensations of fashion reached.
Mr. Paterson's experience lay on the south side of the river, and the district possesses peculiarities of its own. On the whole, I think, the riverside streets there are rather more unhealthy than those in the East End. Many houses stand below water-level, and in digging foundations I have sometimes seen the black sludge of old marshes squirting up through the holes, and even bringing with it embedded reeds that perhaps were growing when Shakespeare acted there. The population is more distinctly English than on the north side. Where the poverty is extreme it is more helpless. Work as a whole is rather steadier, but not so good. The smell is different and very characteristic, partly owing to the hop-markets. Life seems to me rather sadder and more depressing there, with less of gaiety and independence; but that may be because I am more intimate with the East End, and intimacy with working people nearly always improves their aspect. It is, indeed, fortunate for our sensational novelists that they remain so ignorant of their theme, for otherwise murders, monsters, and mysteries would disappear from their pages, and goodness knows how they would make a living then!
It is not crime and savagery that characterise the unknown lands where the working classes of London chiefly live. Matthew Arnold said our lower classes were brutalised, and he was right, but not if by brutality he meant cruelty, violence, or active sin. What characterises them and their streets is poverty. Poverty and her twins, unhappiness and waste. Under unhappiness, we may include the outward conditions of discomfort—the crowded rooms, the foul air, the pervading dirt, the perpetual stench of the poor. In winter the five or six children in a bed grow practised in turning over all at the same time while still asleep, so as not to disturb each other. In a hot summer the bugs drive the families out of the rooms to sleep on the doorstep. Cleanliness is an expensive luxury almost as far beyond poverty's reach as diamonds. The foul skin, the unwashed clothes, the layer of greasy smuts, the boots that once fitted someone, and are now held on by string, the scraps of food bought by the pennyworth, the tea, condensed milk, fried fish, bread and "strawberry flavour," the coal bought by the "half-hundred," the unceasing noise, the absence of peace or rest, the misery of sickness in a crowd—all such things may be counted among the outward conditions of unhappiness, and only people who have never known them would call them trivial. But by the unhappiness that springs from poverty I mean far worse than these.