Part 11

Alas! work must be done if they would drink; they do not mind being badly fed; it is wonderful to think of the small amount of solid food they get, but they must drink. In their single room they have wife and children, but they must drink; they hang about waiting for work, in the hope that no work may come, yet that food will appear; they have neither honesty, nor self-respect, nor any sense of duty or responsibility at all. But they must drink.

What to do for, or with, these unfortunates is the most difficult and the most pressing question of the slums. The only hope seems to be to get hold of the boys and girls and to spare them, if possible, the cruel ordeal of the street.

And meantime, while we look and while we talk, lo! the company has melted away; the cold wind and the rain have fallen upon them; drink has robbed them of their immunity; the infirmary ward holds them to-day; to-morrow the pauper’s funeral will wind up the sum and story of their sordid days.

VII

THE ALIEN

VII

THE ALIEN

LONDON has always held out hands of toleration, if not of welcome, to the alien. He has come to London from every part of Great Britain and Ireland, and from every country of Europe. Under the Plantagenets the country lad was as much an alien or a foreigner as the Hollander or the German. To country lads and the continental alike London was the city paved with gold. First came Saxon, Jute, and Angle; then came Dane; then Norman; after these came Fleming, French, German. The German, indeed, laid hands on our foreign trade and kept it for six hundred years; whenever one of our kings married a foreign princess the Queen’s countrymen flocked over in swarms, to pick up what they could. William the Conqueror’s consort brought over the weavers from her own country; when Eleanor of Provence married Henry III her people came with her, especially the ecclesiastics, seizing on dignities and benefices from the Archbishopric of Canterbury downward; when Queen Mary married Philip of Spain the streets of London were filled with Spaniards; when Charles I married Henrietta of France French priests, for the first time since the Reformation, paraded the streets by scores, offending the Protestant conscience. Italy and the South of France sent usurers with the pope’s license to prey upon the land.

London was a city of refuge as well as a city where gold was to be picked up in the streets. Many exiles have sought and found protection within its walls.

The most important of these arrivals was that of the French Huguenots after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. An immense number came over; in one year 15,500 were relieved by the collection of a fund amounting to £63,713. A large colony of 13,500 of them settled in London, most of them in Spitalfields, at that time still a place of fields. Here they introduced the industry of silk-weaving, very much to the profit of the country and city of their adoption.

The next invasion of aliens was that of the unfortunate Palatines, in the year 1709. The Palatinate had been devastated by the French; it was a vast battle-field plundered during every incursion of the enemy; in despair, the people abandoned their country; they flocked over to England in companies and troops; the immigration continued for three years, during which time thirteen thousand thrust themselves upon the mercy of the City. A collection was made for them amounting to £22,038. These people, who seem to have been agricultural rather than industrial, contributed little to the population of London; three thousand of them were sent to Ireland; to each of the provinces of North and South Carolina six hundred were sent; to New York nearly four thousand, but seventeen hundred died on the voyage, no doubt enfeebled by their sufferings and privations before embarking; they seem not to have met with favor in New York; many of them emigrated to Pennsylvania, where, it is said, their descendants still preserve the memory of their origin. Those who settled in London got their names Anglicized, so that they were entirely absorbed and lost in the general population.

At the beginning of the French Revolution, when the madness of the revolutionaries fell upon the priests and nobles, there was an immense flight of the persecuted classes into England. They did not however, as a rule, come to settle; as soon as circumstances permitted they returned to France; some, however, remained; it is not uncommon to find families descended from the _émigrés_ of 1792–93 who preserve the memory of their former nobility, though they have long since abandoned all intention of claiming a title which carries with it neither privilege nor property nor honor.

The _émigrés_ formed during their stay small colonies in and about London. One of them was at St. Pancras, in whose churchyard many of them are buried; another was a little further out, five or six miles out of the City, at Hampstead—the Roman Catholic chapel built for them still remains; there were other small settlements, and many of them remained in Westminster and in Soho. The hospitality offered them, the pity shown to them, the maintenance granted to them by our government, the cordial friendship extended to them by our people, were worthy of all praise. Yet it was remarked, with some bitterness, that when these refugees were enabled to return to their own country they ignored every obligation of gratitude, or even courtesy, and actually refused to admit their old friends of the English gentry to their salons in Paris. Partly, I believe, this apparent ingratitude was due to their poverty, of which they were ashamed.

Another political invasion of refugees was that of the Poles after their abortive rising in the thirties; they, too were received by our government with a generosity unparalleled. There were many thousands of them. They were granted barracks to live in and a small pension to live upon; both were continued as long as they lived; they must now all be dead; some of them no doubt married here, and their children must now be part of the general population. A few of the most foolhardy ventured back again, to lead one more forlorn hope in another mad attempt at rebellion, and to die unprofitable patriots by the Russian bayonet.

In our own time there has been—it is still going on—a considerable influx of Russian, Polish and German Jews flying from the Judenhetze of the continent. I will speak of them immediately.

Every year there is an immigration as from a barren and an unfertile soil to a land of promise. The immense strides made by industrial Germany during the last few years will probably check this immigration. Hamburg, Berlin, not to speak of Antwerp and Rotterdam, also rapidly growing centers of trade, will attract some of those who have been accustomed to look toward London as the land of promise. At present there appear to be about ten thousand new immigrants every year, without counting those who purpose going on to America. They consist of Russians, Poles, Germans, Dutch, Norwegians, Swedes, Danes, Belgians, French, Austrians, Hungarians, Italians, Swiss—but we have gone through the whole of Europe. I find no mention of Spain or Portugal or Turkey; nor are there, so far as I have heard, any aliens hailing from the smaller peoples—the Croats, Celts, Servians, or Bulgarians. What becomes of this array? What has become of the hundred thousand who have come over during the last ten years? Go up and down the streets of East London—over the shop-fronts you will see everywhere German and Jewish names, which seem to answer this question in part. Walk along the Whitechapel Road on a Sunday morning; there you will see most of the hundred thousand, there you will see the peaceful invaders who have occupied a large part of East London and have achieved for themselves, by dint of unconquerable patience and untiring work, a far better livelihood, with a far higher level of comfort, than could have been possible for them in their native lands. As for their children, you may look for them in the Board-schools; they have become English—both boys and girls: except for their names, they are English through and through; they accept our institutions, laws, and customs; they rejoice with our successes, they grieve with our misfortunes; never yet has it been known that the second generation of the alien has failed to become English through and through. I believe that our power of absorbing alien immigrants is even greater than that of the United States.

The foreign element, with the exception of the Polish Jews, and that only for mutual help and at the outset, does not seek to separate itself and to create its own quarter. In the West End, it is true, there are streets principally inhabited by Italians, French, and Swiss; that is because the people are employed in the restaurants as waiters and cooks, in the laundries, in the _charcuteries_ and provision shops, which exist for the use of the foreigner. But their children will become English; you may see them playing on the asphalted pavements outside the schools; you fail to perceive any difference between the children of the German waiter and those of the English working-man. There are thousands of German clerks in London; they come over, some to stay, some to learn the conduct and the extent of English trade and to take back with them information about markets and prices and profits, which may be useful to their friends of Hamburg and Altona. In either case they learn English as quickly as they can, and live in the English fashion. Where, again, is the French colony? There are thousands of French people in London, but there is no French colony. There is a society of Huguenot families, there is a French hospital, there are two or three French Protestant churches, but there is no part of East London, or of any other quarter of London, where we may find French the prevailing speech. There are, again, a good many Dutch. Where are they? Some of them have a kind of colony in Spitalfields, where they make cigars; as for the rest, they are scattered. One may see some of them any Sunday morning in their church, all that is left of the great church of the Augustine Friars; in that old place a scanty congregation meets for service in the Dutch language and after the Dutch use. It is pleasant to sit among them and to look around upon the serious faces of the Hollanders, our former rivals, and to make believe to listen to the sermon, which sounds so much like English until you try to make out what it means. The feet of these honest burghers rest upon the dust of many great princes and lords and noble dames buried in the church of the Augustines, because it was so holy a place that sepulture here was a certain passport through purgatorial fires, without a stay in purgatory, to the gates of heaven. Hither, on the day after the battle of Barnet, which practically ended the Wars of the Roses, they brought, in the long, grunting country wagons, the bodies of the lords and knights who fell upon the field, and buried them within this church. That of Warwick the king-maker lay here, the face uncovered, for some days, so that the people might be assured of his death. But I doubt whether the Hollander cares much about the bones of ancient nobles. There are also Swedes in East London, but the only place where I have met them is in their church near St. George’s-in-the-East, where you may see them any Sunday at the Swedish service. They are a pleasant-looking race, with brown hair and blue eyes; they appear to be largely composed of seafaring folk; one would like to be able to converse with them. However, they have no quarter of their own.

Of course, the most important foreign element in East London is that of the newly arrived Jewish immigrants. They are the poorest of the very poor; when they come over they have nothing. They are received by the Jewish Board of Guardians, which is, I believe, a model of a well-managed board; work is speedily found for them; their own people take them on at the lowest wage at which life can be sustained until they learn enough to move on and get higher pay. Their ranks are always recruited by new arrivals; there is talk of their taking work away from English workmen. Yet there seem to be no signs, as on the continent, of a Judenhetze, or any such wide-spread, unreasoning hatred of the Jew as we lately saw in France, and such as we have seen in Russia and in Germany.

The newly arrived Jews have their own colony. It has much increased of late years. They now occupy, almost to the exclusion of others, a triangular area of East London—without a map it is not easy to make the limits understood—north of the Whitechapel Road immediately without the city limits: it has a base of nearly half a mile and an altitude of three fourths of a mile. Here, for the time, the poorer Jews are all crowded together. It is alleged that they have ingenious ways of sweating each other; as soon as the Polish Jew has got his head a little above water he begins to exploit his countrymen; he acquires the miserable tenements of the quarter and raises the rent and demands a large sum for the “key”—that is to say, the fine on going in.

These Jews all succeed, unless they are kept down by their favorite vice of gambling. It is perhaps as well for their own peace that for the first few years of their residence in London they should live in their own quarter, among their own people. For the transformation of the poor, starving immigrant, willing to do anything at any wage, to the prosperous master workman is unlovely. He succeeds partly because he is extremely industrious, patient, orderly, and law-abiding. But there are other reasons. It is sometimes pretended that the Jew is endowed naturally with greater intellectual power than is granted to men of other nationality. This I do not believe. The truth seems to be that advanced by Mr. Charles Booth, I think for the first time. “The poorest Jew,” he says, “has inherited through the medium of his religion a trained intellect.” This fact, if you consider it, seems quite sufficient, taken with those other gifts of industry and obedience to order and law, to explain the Jew’s success among the poorer classes through which he works his way upward.

He is a person of trained intellect. What does this mean? Poor and miserable as he stands before you, penniless, ragged, half-starved, cringing, this man has been educated in the history of his own people, in the most ancient literature of the world, in a body of law which exercises all the ingenuity and casuistry of his teachers to harmonize with existing conditions. It is like putting into the works of an engineer, among the general hands, one who has been trained in applied mathematics. Into any kind of work which means competition, the Jew brings the trained intellect and the power of reasoning due to his religious training; he brings also the habit of looking about for chances and looking ahead for possibilities which long generations of self-defense have made hereditary. These faculties he brings into the market; with them he contends against the dull mind, untrained and simple, of the English craftsman. What wonder if he succeeds? Nothing but brute violence, which he will not meet with here, can keep him down.

This I believe to be the great secret of the Jew’s success. It is his intellectual superiority over working-men of his own class. Observe, however, that we do not find him conspicuously successful when he has to measure his intellectual strength against the better class. In law, for instance, he has produced one or two great lawyers, but not more than his share; in mathematics and science, one or two great names, but not more than his share. I am inclined to think that in every branch of intellectual endeavor the Jew holds his own. But I doubt if it can be proved that he does more. So long as we can hold our own in the higher fields there will be no Judenhetze in this country. I am informed, however, that the leaders of the people in London are persistent in their exhortations to the new-comers to make themselves English—to make themselves English as fast as possible; to send their children to the Board-schools, and to make them English. It is the wisest advice. There should be no feeling as of necessary separation between Jew and Christian. We ought to live in amity beside each other, if not with each other; we should no more ask if a man is a Jew than we ask if a man who has just joined our club is a Roman Catholic or a Unitarian.

Yet, even in this country, it cannot be said that the Jew is popular; there are prejudices against him which are no longer those concerning his religion. Here, again, I turn to the authority who has made so profound a study of the question; the importance of the question is my excuse. This is how Mr. Charles Booth explains the dislike and suspicion with which the Jews are still regarded by many: “No one will deny that the children of Israel are the most law-abiding inhabitants of East London.... The Jew is quick to perceive that law and order, and the sanctity of contract, are the _sine qua non_ of a full and free competition in the open market. And it is by competition, and by competition alone, that the Jew seeks success. But in the case of the foreign Jews it is a competition unrestricted by the personal dignity of a definite standard of life and unchecked by the social feelings of class loyalty and trade integrity. The small manufacturer injures the trade through which he rises to the rank of a capitalist by bad and dishonest production. The petty dealer suits his wares and his terms to the weakness, the ignorance, and the vice of his customers; the mechanic, indifferent to the interests of the class to which he belongs, and intent only on becoming a small master, acknowledges no limit to the process of underbidding fellow-workers except the exhaustion of his own strength. In short, the foreign Jew totally ignores all social obligations other than keeping the law of the land, the maintenance of his own family, and the charitable relief of coreligionists.”

The place and time in which to see the poorer Jews of London collected together is on Sunday morning in Wentworth Street and Middlesex Street, Aldgate—the old Petticoat Lane. These streets and those to right and left are inhabited entirely by Jews; Sunday is their market-day; all the shops are open; the streets are occupied by a triple line of stalls, on which are exposed for sale all kinds of things, but chiefly garments—coats and trousers. There is a mighty hubbub of those who chaffer and those who offer and those who endeavor to attract attention. You will see a young fellow mounted on a pair of wooden steps, brandishing something to wear; with eloquence convincing, with gesture and with action, he declares and repeats and assures the people of the stoutness of the material and the excellence of the work. The crowd moves slowly along, it listens critically; this kind of thing may become monotonous; the oratory of the salesman, in order to be effective, continually requires new adjectives, new metaphors, new comparisons; among the crowd are other professors of the salesman’s rhetoric. They know the tricks, they have learned the art. One wonders how many such fervid speeches this young man has to make before he effects a single sale. We need not pity him, although at the close of the market his voice is hoarse with bawling and the results are meager; he enjoys the thing; it is his one day of glory, and he has admirers; he knows that among the audience there are many who envy his powers and would fain take his place and deceive the people.

Not all the holders of stalls are so eloquent. Here, before a miserable tray resting on crazy trestles, stand a ragged old couple. They look very, very poor; they cast wistful eyes upon the heedless crowd; their wares are nothing but common slippers of bright red and blue cloth. Will you buy a pair because the makers are so old and so poor? Alas! they cannot understand your offer; their only language is Yiddish, that remarkable composite tongue which in one place is a mixture of Russian and Hebrew, in another of German and Hebrew, in another of Lettish and Hebrew. They stare, they eagerly offer their wares; a kindly compatriot from the crowd interprets. There is a little bargaining, and the slippers are in your pocket. Very well. It is a piece of good luck for the old pair; like unto him who had the splendid shilling “fate cannot harm them; they will dine to-day.” True to their national instincts, which are Oriental, they have made you pay three times as much for the slippers as they would charge one of their own people. Going on slowly with the crowd one admires the variety of the wares laid out on trestles. Who wants these rusty iron things—keys, locks, broken tools, things unintelligible? Somebody, for there is noisy chaffering.

You observe that the newly arrived Polish Jew is for the most part a man of poor physique; he is a small, narrow-chested, pasty-faced person. “Is this,” you ask, “a descendant of Joshua’s valiant captains? Is this the race which followed Judas Maccabæus? Is this the race which defied the legions of Titus?” “My friend,” replies a kindly scholar, one of their own people, “these are the children of the Ghetto. For two thousand years they have lived in the worst parts of a crowded city; they have been denied work, except of the lowest; they have endured every kind of scorn and contumely. Come again in ten years’ time. In the free air of Anglo-Saxon rule they will grow; you will not know them again.”

It is among these new-comers that one recognizes the Oriental note; there is among the women a love of bright colors; among the men, even with the poorest, a certain desire for display; an assertion of grandeur. Look at this little shop of one window on the ground floor. It is crowded with girls. Outside the proprietor stands. He is not tall, but he swells with pride; a large cigar is between his lips; it is a sign and a symbol. His poorer countrymen look with envy upon that very large cigar. He condescends to talk because he is so proud that he must display the cause of his glory. “All the week,” he says, “I study what to give them on Sunday. To-day it’s bonnets. Last Sunday it was fichus. Next Sunday? That is my secret. My wife serves the shop. I furnish the contents. All the week my son Jacob keeps it, but there is no trade except on Sunday.”

In a second-hand furniture shop, to which we have been directed, the proprietor sits among his tables and chairs. He also has a large cigar for the better display of his grandeur. He is conscious of the envy with which the man who has a shop is regarded by a man who must work with his own hands. This man has more—he has a father. You called on purpose to see that father. You would like to see him? You are invited to step up-stairs. There, in a high-backed chair, with pillows on either side, sits a little shriveled-up creature. His eyes are bright, for he has just awakened from the sleep which fills up most of the day and all the night. Beside him is the Book of the Law in Hebrew. Upon the open book there rests his pipe. Two girls, his great grandchildren, sit with him and watch him. For the old man is a hundred and three years of age. Yet he can still read his Hebrew Bible, and he can still take his pipe of tobacco.

“Last night,” said one of the girls, “we carried him down-stairs into the shop, and the people crowded round to see him. He drank a whole glass of beer—in their sight.”