Watch one of
them. He will stand there, motionless, for hours, and when you go away
you will leave him still staring into vacancy. It is most absorbing. He
has no money for beer, and his lair is only for sleeping purposes, so
what else remains for him to do? He has already solved the mysteries of
girl's love, and wife's love, and child's love, and found them delusions
and shams, vain and fleeting as dew-drops, quick-vanishing before the
ferocious facts of life.
As I say, the young are high-strung, nervous, excitable; the middle-aged
are empty-headed, stolid, and stupid. It is absurd to think for an
instant that they can compete with the workers of the New World.
Brutalised, degraded, and dull, the Ghetto folk will be unable to render
efficient service to England in the world struggle for industrial
supremacy which economists declare has already begun. Neither as workers
nor as soldiers can they come up to the mark when England, in her need,
calls upon them, her forgotten ones; and if England be flung out of the
world's industrial orbit, they will perish like flies at the end of
summer. Or, with England critically situated, and with them made
desperate as wild beasts are made desperate, they may become a menace and
go "swelling" down to the West End to return the "slumming" the West End
has done in the East.
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