The maintenance of the wall has always been a costly business; the tides find out the weak places, and bore into them and behind them like a gimlet that grows every day larger and longer and more powerful. For instance, there was a flourishing monastery near the junction of the Lea with the Thames; it was called the House of Stratford Langthorne. One morning the brethren woke to find that the river wall had given way and that their pastures and meadows, their cornlands and their gardens were all three feet deep in water. They had to get away as fast as they could and to remain in a much smaller and more uncomfortable cell, on higher ground, until the wall could be patched up again. In the fifteenth century the pious ladies of Barking Nunnery made a similar discovery; their portion of the river wall had broken down. They had no funds for its repair. Then King Richard, the third of that name, came to their assistance. This pious monarch had got through with most of his enemies and nearly all his relations, and was just then going off to settle matters with his cousin, Henry the Welshman, when this misfortune to the Barking nuns happened.
Fifty years later the Plumstead marshes were “drowned” by the breaking of the wall. In 1690 the Grays Marsh, lower down the river, was overflowed by the same accident; in 1707 the wall gave way at a place called Dagenham; it took nearly twenty years to repair the wall, which was carried away time after time; the receding tide carried out into the bed of the river so much earth that a bank was formed in mid-channel, and it seemed as if the river would be choked. At last, however, it was found possible to construct a wall which would stand the highest tide. If we walk along this part of the wall we observe a large black pool of water; this was left behind when the wall shut out the river; the lake still remains and is full of fish, and on Sundays it is surrounded by anglers, who stand all day long intent upon expectations which are seldom rewarded. Out of this lake and its fishing originated the ministerial white-bait dinner. It began when the occupant of a house beside this lake invited William Pitt to dine with him in order to taste the eels of the pond and the white-bait of the river. Pitt brought other members of the Cabinet, the dinner became a yearly institution, the place was presently transferred from Dagenham to Greenwich, and the ministerial white-bait dinner was held every year, in June or July, until ten or twelve years ago, when the pleasant institution was stopped.
To return to the date of the wall. We have seen that nobody knows when it was put up, that it must have been there in some form or other for a very long time. It is tolerably certain that the wall was either built by the Romans or that it existed before their time. My own belief is, as I have stated, that it was put up here and there as occasion or necessity served, that some of the land was rescued strip by strip, each time by a new wall advanced before the others. Embankments, mounds, and traces of a more ancient wall can be observed, as I have said, at many points; it is worthy of note that in the county of Lincoln, where there is also the necessity of a sea-wall, there are two, one standing at a distance of half a mile in advance of the other. And I think that this process of rescuing the land has gone on at intervals to the present day. Even now there are broad stretches of mud along the Essex shore which might be reclaimed; at the present moment there are projects afloat for reclaiming the whole of the Wash, but the conditions of agriculture in England are no longer such as to encourage any attempts to add more acres to estates which at present seem unable to pay either landlord or farmer.
I have said enough, however, to show that this earthwork, so much neglected and so little known, is really a most important structure; that it has made East London possible, and London itself healthy, while it has converted miles and miles of barren swamp into smiling meadows and fertile farms.
V
THE FACTORY GIRL
V
THE FACTORY GIRL
EAST LONDON—one cannot repeat it too often—is a city of working bees. As we linger and loiter among the streets multitudinous, we hear, as from a hive, the low, contented murmur of continuous and patient work. There are two millions of working-people in this city. The children work at school; the girls and boys, and the men and women, work in factory, in shop, and at home, in dock and in wharf and in warehouse; all day long and all the year round, these millions work. They are clerks, accountants, managers, foremen, engineers, stokers, porters, stevedores, dockers, smiths, craftsmen of all kinds. They are girls who make things, girls who sew things, girls who sell things. There are among them many poor, driven, sweated creatures, and the sweaters themselves are poor, driven, sweated creatures, for sweating once begun is handed on from one to the other as carefully and as religiously as any holy lamp of learning. They work from early morning till welcome evening. The music of this murmur, rightly understood, is like the soft and distant singing of a hymn of praise. For the curse of labor has been misunderstood; without work man would be even as the beasts of the field. It is the necessity of work that makes him human; of necessity he devises and discovers and invents, because he would die if he did not work; and because he has to subdue the animal within him. The animal is solitary; the man must be gregarious. He must make a friend of his brother, he must obey the stronger, he must make laws, he must fight with nature, and compel her to give up her secrets. It is only by means of work that man can rise; it is his ladder; in the sweat of his face he eats his bread—yea, the bread of life. It is not with any pity that we should listen to this murmur. It should be with pure contentment and gratitude, for the murmur, though it speaks partly of the whirr of ten thousand wheels and partly of those who stand and serve those wheels, speaks also of this blessed quality of work, that it enables men to use the body for the sake of the soul. Man must work.