Part 12
The patriarch nods and laughs, proud of the feat. He then talks about himself. He was born in the Ghetto of Venice—you can see the place to this day. His father came to London when he was a child. His occupation, he tells us, was formerly that of cook. He was employed as cook for the great banquets of the City companies; in that capacity he used to drink as much wine as he wished to have, and in those days he wished for a great deal. His lengthened years, therefore, are not due to abstinence from strong drink. He was also a follower of the Ring, and was constantly engaged as second or bottle-holder in the prize-fights so common in the first sixty years of the century. He remembers what was once considered a great political event, the committal of Sir Francis Burdett to the Tower of London in 1808. Sir Francis was at the time a leading Radical. He was afterward the father of Angela, Lady Burdett-Coutts, a leader in the noble army of philanthropists.
We are not allowed to talk too long to this ancient and venerable survival. After a quarter of an hour or so his watchful nurses dismiss us, and he promises to see us again—“if I live,” he adds, with a sigh. “If I live.” It is his constant refrain. He has outlived all his friends, all his companions, all his enemies, all his contemporaries. There is no pleasure left to him save that of being admired on account of extreme old age. It is enough. It binds him to life; he would not wish to die so long as that is left. “If I live,” he says.
For my own part, I like sometimes to sit in the synagogue on the Sabbath and listen to the service, which I do not understand. For it seems to explain the people—their intense pride, their tenacity, their separation from the rest of the world. Their service—I may be mistaken; I have no Hebrew—strikes upon my ears as one long, grand hymn of praise and gladness. The hymns they sing, the weird, strange melodies of the hymns, are those, they allege, which were sung when Israel went out of Egypt; they are those which were sung when in the Red Sea the waters stood up like a wall on either side to let them through; they are those which were sung when Pharaoh’s hosts lay drowning and the walls of water closed together. The service, the reading, the hymns, the responses—they are all an assertion that the choice of the Lord hath fallen upon this people; the Lord their God hath chosen them. Let no one speak of Jews until he has listened to their service. By their worship the mind of a people may be discerned.
I have already mentioned the settlement of the Huguenot silk-weavers at Spitalfields—the fields behind the old hospital and monastery called St. Mary’s. There they have remained. Until quite recently, they carried on from father to son the trade of silk-weaving; there are silk-weavers in Spitalfields and Bethnal Green. An attempt has been made to revive the trade; meantime many of the old houses remain with their wide windows on the first floor, and over the shops one may still see the French names, or these names rudely Anglicized. But the French settlement no longer exists; the French language has been forgotten, and the Huguenots are completely absorbed. They are now like all the rest of us, a mongrel blend of Celt, Saxon, Dane, Norman, Fleming, and everything else. It is the Anglo-Saxon blend, or, as we ought rather to call it, the Anglo-Celtic blend.
A small colony of Italians has settled in another part of London—not in East London. You would know the colony, which does not belong to these pages, if you were to stumble upon it accidentally, by the barrel-organs in the courts, by the barrows on which the Italian costers carry round their penny ices, by the bright-colored handkerchiefs and the black hair of the women, and by the cheap Italian restaurants, where the colonists can rejoice in Italian cookery and Italian wine.
In the West India Dock Road, before you reach the docks, there is a building on the north side which contains a colony always changing. It is the home of the Indian and Malay sailors—the Lascars and the Arabs. I remember spending a morning there with one who was afterward murdered by Cairene ruffians in the desert of Sinai. This man loved the place because he loved the Oriental folk who lodged there, and because he not only talked their languages, but knew their manners and customs, and would sit with them after their manner, talk with them on their own subjects, and become one of themselves. On this occasion he met a certain poor Persian scholar down on his luck. He was a man of great dignity and presence, insomuch that one realized the truth that in the East clothes do not make the man. He was in rags, but he had lost nothing of his dignity. It was pleasant to see them sitting down together on the floor, side by side, discussing and quoting Persian poetry, and still more pleasant to see the Persian quickly yielding to the charm of a common love of literature and treating the infidel as a friend and a brother. It is a strange place and full of strange people; no one can understand how strange it is, how great is the gulf between the Oriental and the Occidental, unless he can talk with them and learn how they think and how they regard us. My friend interpreted for me, afterward, something of what the Persian scholar had said. Colossal is the pride of the Oriental; inconceivable the contempt with which he regards the restless West.
“Here as I sit by the Jumna bank, Watching the flow of the sacred stream, Pass me the legions, rank on rank, And the cannon roar and the bayonets gleam.”
* * * * *
“When shall these phantoms wither away, Like the smoke of the guns on the wind-swept hill, Like the sounds and colors of yesterday; And the soul have rest and the air be still?”
Nearly opposite this house is a small street which contains the Chinese colony. Compared with the Chinese colony of New York, part of which I once visited, one sweltering night in July, that of London is a small thing and of no importance. Yet it is curious. There are not, I believe, more than a hundred Chinese, or thereabouts, in all; they occupy a few houses in this street; there are one or two small shops kept by Chinamen; it is considered quite safe to visit the place, at all events in the daytime; I was myself taken there by one who was personally known to the shopkeepers. There was not much that was attractive or interesting offered for sale, except Chinese playing-cards, which are curious; conversation in Pidgin-English is difficult at first, but one quickly acquires enough of the _patois_. There is a boarding-house for Chinese in the street; the ground floor we found furnished with a tiny joss-house, in one corner, and a large table which occupied nearly the whole of the room; the table was covered with Chinamen sitting and sprawling; they were wholly absorbed in a little gamble with dominoes and small Chinese coins; their absorption in the chances of the game was complete. One of them, the banker, manipulated the dominoes; nobody spoke; every time that a domino was turned there was the exchange of coins in silence. The eager, intent faces were terrifying; one recognized the passion which sees nothing, hears nothing, cares for nothing, feels nothing, but the fierce eagerness of play. We looked on for five minutes. No one spoke, no one breathed. Then I became aware that in a room, a cupboard at the back, there was a fire, with a great black pot hanging over it and a man with a spoon taking off the cover and stirring the contents and inspecting the progress of the stew. Presently he came out, ladle in hand, and bawled aloud, but in Chinese. I took his bawling for an announcement of dinner. But none of the players heard; the banker turned up another domino; there was another exchange of coins; no one heeded the call.
Yet it was the dinner-bell; down-stairs came chattering, laughing, and joking, half a dozen of the boarders, each with a basin in his hand. The cook filled every man’s basin, and they went up-stairs again, and none of the players marked them or heeded them, or turned his head, and none of the boarders took the slightest notice of the players. Nobody meanwhile paid the least attention to the joss-house, where burned the candle which is said to be the Chinaman’s sole act of worship. And nobody took the least notice of the stranger who stood at the door and looked on.
Across the road, in another house, was an opium den. We have read accounts of the dreadful place, have we not? Greatly to my disappointment, because when one goes to an opium den for the first time one expects a creeping of the flesh at least, the place was neither dreadful nor horrible. The room was of fair size, on the first floor; it was furnished with a great bed, covered with a mattress; there was a bench against the wall, and there were half a dozen common cane chairs. Two men were lying on the bed enjoying the opium sleep, perhaps with the dreams that De Quincey has described—but one cannot, even the thought reader cannot, read another man’s dreams. A third man was taking his opium by means of a long pipe. Half a dozen men were waiting their turn. One of them had a musical instrument. Except for the smell of the place, which was overwhelming, the musical instrument was the only horror of the opium den. When I think of it I seem to remember a thousand finger-nails scratching the window, or ten thousand slate-pencils scratching a schoolboy’s slate. It is one of those memories which sink into the brain and never leave a man. Nor can I understand why, under the weird and wonderful torture of the intolerable music of that instrument, even the sleepers themselves did not awake, their dreams dissipated, their opium, so to speak, wasted and rendered of none account, and fly, shrieking, forswearing forever opium and the Chinese quarter.
There are small colonies and settlements of other foreigners. Anarchists make little clubs where murders are hatched, especially murders of foreign sovereigns; they think to overthrow a settled government by the assassination of a king; they succeed only in adding one more to the anxieties and the dangers that accompany a crown. There are Orleanists, Bonapartists, Carlists, and I know not what, who carry on their little intrigues and their correspondence with partizans in France and Spain and elsewhere, with a great show of zeal and much promise of results—the day after to-morrow. But with these we have nothing to do. It is enough for us to note the continual immigration into London of aliens who become in a few years English in manners, and in the next generation are English in speech and in thought, in will, as in manners. As it was in the days of Edward I, when the men of Rouen, the men of Caen, the men of the Empire, the Venetian, the Genoese, the Fleming, the Gascon, the Spaniard, the Hamburger, from every part of western Europe came as merchants to trade, and remained to settle. So it is in the days of Victoria. They come to the banks of the Thames by thousands every year, and they come to stay, and they are content to be absorbed.
VIII
THE HOUSELESS
VIII
THE HOUSELESS
AT the present moment nearly all those parts of East London which are inhabited by working-men of all kinds, from the foreman and the engineer and the respectable craftsman in steady employ at good wages down to the casual and the dock-hand and the children of the street, are suffering from a dearth of houses. In this vast labyrinthine maze of streets—all houses—there are not enough houses. The people are willing to incur discomfort; a respectable household, accustomed to the decencies of life and the wholesome separation of their children from themselves and from each other, will consent to pack them all into one room, or into a work-man’s flat of two rooms in a “model” barrack; they are ready to offer double the former rent, with a tremendous premium on the “key,” but still there are no houses and no lodgings to be had even on those terms. The rents of the lowest tenements are mounting daily; there seems to be no limit in the upward tendency; the landlord is no longer doubtful as to the increased rent he can demand; the rise is automatic, it goes on without any stimulus or grinding on his part. A single room, in some quarters, is the very best that can be hoped for; the rent of that room, which was formerly from three to four shillings, is now six or more, while the charge for the “key,”—_i.e._, the fine on taking the room,—which was formerly a few shillings, is now a pound or even more.
Meantime, although they are willing to pay the high rents, people are everywhere found wandering in search of lodgings. A workman who has found employment must be within easy reach of his work; if he cannot find lodgings, what is he to do? The workhouse authorities have in some cases risen to the occasion. They agree to take in a man’s wife and family and to keep them at a fixed charge until the breadwinner finds a lodging. He himself seeks a fourpenny bed at a “doss” house—_i.e._, a common lodging-house.
In some parts it is reported that the overcrowding has actually led to the letting, not of rooms, but of beds; the children are put to sleep under the bed; men on night duty hire the bed for the day; nay, it is even said that beds are divided among three tenants, or sets of tenants. Of these one will occupy it from ten in the evening till six in the morning, another from six in the morning till two in the afternoon, and a third from two until ten. This Box and Cox arrangement would present difficulties with the children.
The situation, which has been growing worse for a long time, has now reached that acute stage in a social problem when it can no longer be neglected by statesmen or by philanthropists. Attention, at least, has been called to the evil—papers are read, articles are written, speeches are made; so far we have got little farther than an understanding of the difficulties which are such as to seem fatal to any proposed remedy that has been yet advanced. For my own part, I have no views except a conviction that something must be done, and that without delay, and that the best that can be done will only be the least dangerous of many proposed experiments.
The subject may appear technical and dry, but it is impossible to speak of work-a-day London without touching on the difficulty of housing the people. A speaker at a recent meeting took exception to the phrase “housing of the people.” He said, which is quite true, that the people are not cattle. We are not, yet we must be housed whether we are rich or poor, or only middling. I am, myself, housed indifferent well, but I feel no comparison with an ox or a cow when I am told so.
The facts of the case were first ascertained by a commissioner for the “Daily News,” and published in that paper early in 1899. The work was carried out by Mr. George Haw, a resident in one of the new settlements. The reader who wishes to consider the subject from every point of view is referred to the volume in which Mr. Haw has reprinted his valuable papers.
It is not probable that the difficulties which any one populous city has to encounter have no lesson to convey to other cities, though the circumstances in each case must vary with the conditions of site, access, and many other considerations. Overcrowding in New York or in Boston would certainly present many features differing widely from those in London. Moreover, the remedy or the alleviations which would serve in one case might be impossible in another.
The principal causes operating to produce this overcrowding are three—the vast and rapid increase of population, the extraordinary development of new industries in East London, with a consequent demand for more labor, and the flocking of country lads into the town.
For instance, there are two places, both lying outside the limits of the London County Council, which twenty or thirty years ago were mere villages or rural hamlets, the churches standing among market gardens and fields, having still their great houses and gardens, the residence of City merchants who drove in their own carriages to and from their offices. One of them, called East Ham, I remember, a quarter of a century ago, as a village spread about on a large area, as if land had no value. It was a flat expanse, fertile, and lying close to the Thames marshes. The map of that time shows farms and farmhouses, almshouses, and a few cottages. This place has now a population of ninety thousand, increasing every day, and consisting entirely of the working-class.
Its neighbor, formerly also a village a little nearer London and called West Ham, presents on the map of 1891 the aspect, familiar to the growing suburban town, of a small central area covered with streets, and with new streets running out north, south, east, and west. It is quite obvious from the map that West Ham was destined to be rapidly built over. It is now a huge town of two hundred and seventy thousand people, also, like East Ham, entirely consisting of working-people. It was at one time a place much loved by Quakers; evidence of their occupation still remains in certain stately old houses, now let out in lodgings; their gardens are built over; the character of the place is changed; the streets are crowded with people; trains and omnibuses run about all day; one of the Quaker’s gardens still survives; it belonged to a member of the Gurney family; the house has been pulled down, but the lordly garden is kept up and the grounds around it have become the park for the West Ham folk. The quickened demand for lodgings has caused the whole of this town to be overrun with streets of small workmen’s houses, containing four or six rooms each, most of which are let to families by two rooms or by single rooms. But the demand still continues; by-streets are run across, narrow lanes usurp the small backyard or little slip of garden; when the whole available space is built over, what will happen next? The crazy condition of these jerry-built houses, after a few years, opens up another and a different set of questions. The case of West Ham represents only on a more rapid scale what has been going on for many years over the whole of industrial London. And now we seem at last to have arrived at an end to the accommodation possible on the old method of small houses and narrow streets.
The results of the overcrowding are, as might be expected, deplorable in the extreme. Among other evils, it kills the infants; it dwarfs those who grow up among its evil influences; it poisons the air; it deprives the house of comfort, of cleanliness, of decency; it drives the man to drink; and it makes the life of their unhappy wives one long-continued misery of hopeless battle with dirt and disease. The late Sir Benjamin Richardson would allow, in his “City of Health,” no more than twenty-five persons to an acre; in some of the outlying suburbs of London there are no more; in others there are, or have been, actually as many as 3000 people crowded together over a single acre of ground. Put them up all together in a solid square; each person will take 2 feet by 1½ feet—that is, three square feet. The whole company of 3000 will stand on 9000 square feet, or 1000 square yards. This is about a fifth of an acre, so that if we spread them out to cover the whole of the acre each person will have no more than a square yard and a half in which to stand, to sleep, and to breathe.
Of course, the first effect of the overcrowding is the vitiation of the air. The extent of this vitiation has been ascertained by chemical analysis. But, indeed, the senses of sight and smell do not require the aid of chemical analysis in order to prove that the air is corrupt and unwholesome. It is poisoned by the breathing of so many; by the refuse that will always be found lying about where a multitude of people are massed together; by all the contributions of all the unwashed. Sometimes the kindly rains descend and wash the pavements and the roads; sometimes the fresh breeze quickens and drives out the malodorous air from the narrow streets, but wind and rain cannot enter into rooms where the occupants jealously keep the windows closed, and fear cold more than they fear the fetid breath of diphtheria and fever; the wind drops; the warm sun comes out; then from the ground under and between the stones, from the saturated road, from the brick walls, from the open doors, the foul air steals back into the street and hangs over the houses invisible, yet almost as pestilential as the white mist of the morning that floats above the tropical marsh.
The magnitude of the evil may be estimated by the fact that nearly a million people have to live in London under these conditions. A whole million of people are condemned to this misery and to the moral and physical sufferings entailed—the degradation of decent women, the death of children who might have grown up honest and respectable men and women! A whole million! We cannot think in millions; the magnitude of the number conveys no impression as to the magnitude of the evil. We can only realize it by taking a single case. Let us take the case of A. B. and his family. He was by trade a mechanical engineer; perhaps they called him a fitter, but it matters nothing; he was a decent and a sober man; he had a wife and five children, the eldest of whom was twelve and as “likely” a girl as one would see anywhere—but they were all likely children, clean and well kept and well fed and well mannered, the pride of their mother. The man had employment offered him in some works. It was absolutely necessary for him to live near his work. He broke up, therefore, his “little home”—they all delight in making a “little home”—and brought his children to live in the overcrowded quarter near his work. After a great deal of difficulty he secured one room. It was no more than ten feet square; in that room he had to pack all his children and his wife and all his effects. There was simply no room for the latter; he therefore pawned them; it would be only for a time, a few days, a week or two, and they would find a house, or at least better lodgings. Imagine, if you can, the change. This unfortunate family came from a decent flat of three rooms, in which the two boys slept in the living-room, the three girls in one bedroom and the parents in the other. They had on the staircase access to a common laundry; the roof was the place for drying the clothes; it was also a place where on a summer evening they could breathe fresh air. In place of this flat they had to accommodate themselves in a single small room. This had to contain all their furniture; to be at once the common bedroom, living-room, kitchen, wash-house, drying-room, dressing-room—think of it! There was, however, no choice. They pawned most of their “sticks”; they brought in nothing but absolute necessaries; they had a large bed, a table, a cupboard, two or three chairs, some kitchen things, and a washtub—little else. And so, uncomplaining, they settled down. It would only be for a week or two. Meantime, the rent of this den was 6_s._ 6_d._ a week, and a pound for the “key.”