Through a couple of streets and we are back in common lodging-house land. There is one long street in which the houses are registered from end to end. Some of them look like shops with the shutters up, others like private houses that have come down in the world. But every room is packed with as many beds as the law permits, and the common kitchen is reached by the area steps.
At one of the houses along this street a man and a woman are standing at the door. The woman has only one arm and one eye, the man has no arms. But they are a highly popular couple, and a good many of the lodging-houses in the street belong to them. The lady is said to be quite equal to quieting any disturbance among the lodgers with her one hand, and the man displays the most remarkable skill, suffering apparently little inconvenience from his loss. When you have seen him take his pipe out of his mouth with the empty sleeve of his jacket you will understand how he is able, with his wife's assistance, to keep his rough clientèle well in hand, and to compel their respect.
There is one feature of Notting Dale which strikes you forcibly if you go into a local crowd engaged in a heated argument, and that is the preponderance of the rural accent; for this is a district in which the evil of rural immigration has written itself large. Thousands of honest country folks crowd up year after year to the great city that they believe to be paved with gold. Of those who come in by the Great Western a large percentage drift to the Dale, failing to find room in the districts around the terminus; and in the Dale a process of moral deterioration goes on which is a tragedy.
The husband fails to find the work he expected would be ready to his hand in busy London. The little savings are soon gone; the man and his wife are driven to the common lodging-house, or, if there are children with them, to the furnished room. The wife perhaps goes to the laundry work. The husband's enforced idleness often ends in his becoming a confirmed loafer, contented to live on what his wife can earn. There is in Notting Dale a large working population living cleanly by honest industry, but the country folk who have been unfortunate at the commencement of the struggle for life in London cannot avail themselves of the cleaner accommodation and the better environment. They are forced into the area which is given over to the vicious and the criminal, and they gradually sink to the level of their neighbours.
Many a tale of heroic struggle against evil surroundings do the women tell who come before the School Board officials to explain the non-attendance of their children. Sometimes it is the man who has had the moral strength to resist, and with tears in his eyes will tell of the healthy, country-bred wife who came with him one day from the far-away village full of hope, but who has yielded to the awful environment, deserted his home, and left his children to fall into evil companionship.
There is no sadder chapter in the story of London than that of the light-hearted country folk who come to it full of courage and hope, and gradually sink down under the evil influence of a slum to which their poverty has driven them, until they themselves are as criminal and as vicious as their neighbours.
For them little can be done, though now and again the brave men and women who are working in the good cause succeed in rescuing them, even though they have fallen to the lowest depths of the abyss.
But for the next generation the hope is greater. High above one of the most notorious streets in the Dale tower the great buildings in which the children are gathered together and educated and taught the principles of right doing.
This is the thought that comes to me as, fresh from our pilgrimage of pain, we stand in the big playground and watch the little ones filing out in the sunshine to go to their homes. Some of them are well clad, the children of honest, hard-working folk who love them and care for them. But many are going back to miserable dens where there is neither love nor care, where there is no respect for the laws of God or man.
