She has six children to support, and the rent of
her house was fourteen shillings per week. She gets her living by
letting the house to lodgers and doing a day's washing or charring.
That woman, with tears in her eyes, told me that the landlord had
increased the rent from fourteen shillings to eighteen shillings. What
could the woman do? There is no accommodation in Stepney. Every
place is taken up and overcrowded.
Class supremacy can rest only on class degradation; and when the workers
are segregated in the Ghetto, they cannot escape the consequent
degradation. A short and stunted people is created--a breed strikingly
differentiated from their masters' breed, a pavement folk, as it were
lacking stamina and strength. The men become caricatures of what
physical men ought to be, and their women and children are pale and
anaemic, with eyes ringed darkly, who stoop and slouch, and are early
twisted out of all shapeliness and beauty.
To make matters worse, the men of the Ghetto are the men who are left--a
deteriorated stock, left to undergo still further deterioration. For a
hundred and fifty years, at least, they have been drained of their best.
The strong men, the men of pluck, initiative, and ambition, have been
faring forth to the fresher and freer portions of the globe, to make new
lands and nations.
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