If the East End is worthy of no worse title than The City of
Dreadful Monotony, and if working people are unworthy of variety and
beauty and surprise, it would not be such a bad place in which to live.
But the East End does merit a worse title. It should be called The City
of Degradation.
While it is not a city of slums, as some people imagine, it may well be
said to be one gigantic slum. From the standpoint of simple decency and
clean manhood and womanhood, any mean street, of all its mean streets, is
a slum. Where sights and sounds abound which neither you nor I would
care to have our children see and hear is a place where no man's children
should live, and see, and hear. Where you and I would not care to have
our wives pass their lives is a place where no other man's wife should
have to pass her life. For here, in the East End, the obscenities and
brute vulgarities of life are rampant. There is no privacy. The bad
corrupts the good, and all fester together. Innocent childhood is sweet
and beautiful: but in East London innocence is a fleeting thing, and you
must catch them before they crawl out of the cradle, or you will find the
very babes as unholily wise as you.
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