This means that more room should be
obtained; but these little mouths and bodies mean additional expense and
make it absolutely impossible to get more spacious quarters. More babies
come. There is not room in which to turn around. The youngsters run the
streets, and by the time they are twelve or fourteen the room-issue comes
to a head, and out they go on the streets for good. The boy, if he be
lucky, can manage to make the common lodging-houses, and he may have any
one of several ends. But the girl of fourteen or fifteen, forced in this
manner to leave the one room called home, and able to earn at the best a
paltry five or six shillings per week, can have but one end. And the
bitter end of that one end is such as that of the woman whose body the
police found this morning in a doorway in Dorset Street, Whitechapel.
Homeless, shelterless, sick, with no one with her in her last hour, she
had died in the night of exposure. She was sixty-two years old and a
match vendor. She died as a wild animal dies.
Fresh in my mind is the picture of a boy in the dock of an East End
police court. His head was barely visible above the railing. He was
being proved guilty of stealing two shillings from a woman, which he had
spent, not for candy and cakes and a good time, but for food.
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