There remain, alas! those with whom we began, the company of two or three who hang around the corner outside the public house or lean against the walls of the docks. They are the men whom the ordeal of the street, more than any other cause, has broken down. They have emerged from that ordeal with a confirmed habit of taking the Easy Way, that of no self-restraint, that which temptation indicates with beckoning finger and false smiles; at nineteen they have lost any possible joy of work, pride in work, desire for work—they know not any work which can afford the workman joy or pride; to them the necessity for work is an ever-present curse which corrupts and poisons life. Were it not for this cruel necessity they might pass through the allotted span with no more effort and no more ambition than the common slug of the hedge.
Alas! work must be done if they would drink; they do not mind being badly fed; it is wonderful to think of the small amount of solid food they get, but they must drink. In their single room they have wife and children, but they must drink; they hang about waiting for work, in the hope that no work may come, yet that food will appear; they have neither honesty, nor self-respect, nor any sense of duty or responsibility at all. But they must drink.
What to do for, or with, these unfortunates is the most difficult and the most pressing question of the slums. The only hope seems to be to get hold of the boys and girls and to spare them, if possible, the cruel ordeal of the street.
And meantime, while we look and while we talk, lo! the company has melted away; the cold wind and the rain have fallen upon them; drink has robbed them of their immunity; the infirmary ward holds them to-day; to-morrow the pauper’s funeral will wind up the sum and story of their sordid days.
VII
THE ALIEN
VII
THE ALIEN
LONDON has always held out hands of toleration, if not of welcome, to the alien. He has come to London from every part of Great Britain and Ireland, and from every country of Europe. Under the Plantagenets the country lad was as much an alien or a foreigner as the Hollander or the German. To country lads and the continental alike London was the city paved with gold. First came Saxon, Jute, and Angle; then came Dane; then Norman; after these came Fleming, French, German. The German, indeed, laid hands on our foreign trade and kept it for six hundred years; whenever one of our kings married a foreign princess the Queen’s countrymen flocked over in swarms, to pick up what they could. William the Conqueror’s consort brought over the weavers from her own country; when Eleanor of Provence married Henry III her people came with her, especially the ecclesiastics, seizing on dignities and benefices from the Archbishopric of Canterbury downward; when Queen Mary married Philip of Spain the streets of London were filled with Spaniards; when Charles I married Henrietta of France French priests, for the first time since the Reformation, paraded the streets by scores, offending the Protestant conscience. Italy and the South of France sent usurers with the pope’s license to prey upon the land.