Her mother was a widow and a blouse-maker. She paid five
shillings a week rent. Here are the last items in her housekeeping
account: Tea. 0.5d.; sugar, 0.5d.; bread, 0.25d.; margarine, 1d.; oil,
1.5d.; and firewood, 1d. Good housewives of the soft and tender folk,
imagine yourselves marketing and keeping house on such a scale, setting a
table for five, and keeping an eye on your deputy mother of twelve to see
that she did not steal food for her little brothers and sisters, the
while you stitched, stitched, stitched at a nightmare line of blouses,
which stretched away into the gloom and down to the pauper's coffin a-
yawn for you.
CHAPTER XIX--THE GHETTO
Is it well that while we range with Science, glorying in the time,
City children soak and blacken soul and sense in city slime?
There among the gloomy alleys Progress halts on palsied feet;
Crime and hunger cast out maidens by the thousand on the street;
There the master scrimps his haggard seamstress of her daily bread;
There the single sordid attic holds the living and the dead;
There the smouldering fire of fever creeps across the rotted floor,
And the crowded couch of incest, in the warrens of the poor.
Pages:
168
169
170
171
172
173
174
175
176
177
178
179
180
181
182
183
184
185
186
187
188
189
190
191
192