Forgetting the world is fair.”
There is one beautiful sight in the East End, and only one, and it is the children dancing in the street when the organ-grinder goes his round. It is fascinating to watch them, the new-born, the next generation, swaying and stepping, with pretty little mimicries and graceful2 inventions all their own, with muscles that move swiftly and easily, and bodies that leap airily, weaving rhythms never taught in dancing school.
I have talked with these children, here, there, and everywhere, and they struck me as being bright as other children, and in many ways even brighter. They have most active little imaginations. Their capacity for projecting themselves into the realm of romance and fantasy is remarkable3. A joyous4 life is romping5 in their blood. They delight in music, and motion, and colour, and very often they betray a startling beauty of face and form under their filth6 and rags.
But there is a Pied Piper of London Town who steals them all away. They disappear. One never sees them again, or anything that suggests them. You may look for them in vain amongst the generation of grown-ups. Here you will find stunted7 forms, ugly faces, and blunt and stolid8 minds. Grace, beauty, imagination, all the resiliency of mind and muscle, are gone. Sometimes, however, you may see a woman, not necessarily old, but twisted and deformed9 out of all womanhood, bloated and drunken, lift her draggled skirts and execute a few grotesque10 and lumbering11 steps upon the pavement. It is a hint that she was once one of those children who danced to the organ-grinder. Those grotesque and lumbering steps are all that is left of the promise of childhood. In the befogged recesses12 of her brain has arisen a fleeting13 memory that she was once a girl. The crowd closes in. Little girls are dancing beside her, about her, with all the pretty graces she dimly recollects14, but can no more than parody15 with her body. Then she pants for breath, exhausted16, and stumbles out through the circle. But the little girls dance on.
The children of the Ghetto17 possess all the qualities which make for noble manhood and womanhood; but the Ghetto itself, like an infuriated tigress turning on its young, turns upon and destroys all these qualities, blots18 out the light and laughter, and moulds those it does not kill into sodden19 and forlorn creatures, uncouth20, degraded, and wretched below the beasts of the field.
As to the manner in which this is done, I have in previous chapters described it at length; here let Professor Huxley describe it in brief:—
“Any one who is acquainted with the state of the population of all great industrial centres, whether in this or other countries, is aware that amidst a large and increasing body of that population there reigns22 supreme23 . . . that condition which the French call la misere, a word for which I do not think there is any exact English equivalent. It is a condition in which the food, warmth, and clothing which are necessary for the mere24 maintenance of the functions of the body in their normal state cannot be obtained; in which men, women, and children are forced to crowd into dens25 wherein decency26 is abolished, and the most ordinary conditions of healthful existence are impossible of attainment27; in which the pleasures within reach are reduced to brutality28 and drunkenness; in which the pains accumulate at compound interest in the shape of starvation, disease, stunted development, and moral degradation29; in which the prospect30 of even steady and honest industry is a life of unsuccessful battling with hunger, rounded by a pauper’s grave.”
In such conditions, the outlook for children is hopeless. They die like flies, and those that survive, survive because they possess excessive vitality31 and a capacity of adaptation to the degradation with which they are surrounded. They have no home life. In the dens and lairs32 in which they live they are exposed to all that is obscene and indecent. And as their minds are made rotten, so are their bodies made rotten by bad sanitation33, overcrowding, and underfeeding. When a father and mother live with three or four children in a room where the children take turn about in sitting up to drive the rats away from the sleepers34, when those children never have enough to eat and are preyed35 upon and made miserable36 and weak by swarming37 vermin, the sort of men and women the survivors38 will make can readily be imagined.
“Dull despair and misery39
Lie about them from their birth;
Ugly curses, uglier mirth,
Are their earliest lullaby.”
A man and a woman marry and set up housekeeping in one room. Their income does not increase with the years, though their family does, and the man is exceedingly lucky if he can keep his health and his job. A baby comes, and then another. 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 spacious40 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 paltry41 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 doorway42 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 vendor43. 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.
“Why didn’t you ask the woman for food?” the magistrate44 demanded, in a hurt sort of tone. “She would surely have given you something to eat.”
“If I ’ad arsked ’er, I’d got locked up for beggin’,” was the boy’s reply.
The magistrate knitted his brows and accepted the rebuke45. Nobody knew the boy, nor his father or mother. He was without beginning or antecedent, a waif, a stray, a young cub46 seeking his food in the jungle of empire, preying47 upon the weak and being preyed upon by the strong.
The people who try to help, who gather up the Ghetto children and send them away on a day’s outing to the country, believe that not very many children reach the age of ten without having had at least one day there. Of this, a writer says: “The mental change caused by one day so spent must not be undervalued. Whatever the circumstances, the children learn the meaning of fields and woods, so that descriptions of country scenery in the books they read, which before conveyed no impression, become now intelligible48.”
One day in the fields and woods, if they are lucky enough to be picked up by the people who try to help! And they are being born faster every day than they can be carted off to the fields and woods for the one day in their lives. One day! In all their lives, one day! And for the rest of the days, as the boy told a certain bishop49, “At ten we ’ops the wag; at thirteen we nicks things; an’ at sixteen we bashes the copper50.” Which is to say, at ten they play truant51, at thirteen steal, and at sixteen are sufficiently52 developed hooligans to smash the policemen.
The Rev21. J. Cartmel Robinson tells of a boy and girl of his parish who set out to walk to the forest. They walked and walked through the never-ending streets, expecting always to see it by-and-by; until they sat down at last, faint and despairing, and were rescued by a kind woman who brought them back. Evidently they had been overlooked by the people who try to help.
The same gentleman is authority for the statement that in a street in Hoxton (a district of the vast East End), over seven hundred children, between five and thirteen years, live in eighty small houses. And he adds: “It is because London has largely shut her children in a maze53 of streets and houses and robbed them of their rightful inheritance in sky and field and brook54, that they grow up to be men and women physically55 unfit.”
He tells of a member of his congregation who let a basement room to a married couple. “They said they had two children; when they got possession it turned out that they had four. After a while a fifth appeared, and the landlord gave them notice to quit. They paid no attention to it. Then the sanitary56 inspector57 who has to wink58 at the law so often, came in and threatened my friend with legal proceedings59. He pleaded that he could not get them out. They pleaded that nobody would have them with so many children at a rental60 within their means, which is one of the commonest complaints of the poor, by-the-bye. What was to be done? The landlord was between two millstones. Finally he applied61 to the magistrate, who sent up an officer to inquire into the case. Since that time about twenty days have elapsed, and nothing has yet been done. Is this a singular case? By no means; it is quite common.”
Last week the police raided a disorderly house. In one room were found two young children. They were arrested and charged with being inmates62 the same as the women had been. Their father appeared at the trial. He stated that himself and wife and two older children, besides the two in the dock, occupied that room; he stated also that he occupied it because he could get no other room for the half-crown a week he paid for it. The magistrate discharged the two juvenile63 offenders64 and warned the father that he was bringing his children up unhealthily.
But there is no need further to multiply instances. In London the slaughter65 of the innocents goes on on a scale more stupendous than any before in the history of the world. And equally stupendous is the callousness66 of the people who believe in Christ, acknowledge God, and go to church regularly on Sunday. For the rest of the week they riot about on the rents and profits which come to them from the East End stained with the blood of the children. Also, at times, so peculiarly are they made, they will take half a million of these rents and profits and send it away to educate the black boys of the Soudan.
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1
grovel
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| vi.卑躬屈膝，奴颜婢膝 | |
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graceful
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| adj.优美的，优雅的；得体的 | |
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remarkable
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| adj.显著的，异常的，非凡的，值得注意的 | |
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joyous
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| adj.充满快乐的；令人高兴的 | |
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romping
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| adj.嬉戏喧闹的，乱蹦乱闹的v.嬉笑玩闹( romp的现在分词 )；（尤指在赛跑或竞选等中）轻易获胜 | |
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filth
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| n.肮脏，污物，污秽；淫猥 | |
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stunted
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| adj.矮小的；发育迟缓的 | |
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stolid
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| adj.无动于衷的，感情麻木的 | |
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deformed
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| adj.畸形的；变形的；丑的，破相了的 | |
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grotesque
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| adj.怪诞的，丑陋的；n.怪诞的图案，怪人（物） | |
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lumbering
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| n.采伐林木 | |
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recesses
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| n.壁凹( recess的名词复数 )；（工作或业务活动的）中止或暂停期间；学校的课间休息；某物内部的凹形空间v.把某物放在墙壁的凹处( recess的第三人称单数 )；将（墙）做成凹形，在（墙）上做壁龛；休息，休会，休庭 | |
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fleeting
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| adj.短暂的，飞逝的 | |
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recollects
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| v.记起，想起( recollect的第三人称单数 ) | |
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parody
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| n.打油诗文，诙谐的改编诗文，拙劣的模仿；v.拙劣模仿，作模仿诗文 | |
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exhausted
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| adj.极其疲惫的，精疲力尽的 | |
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ghetto
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| n.少数民族聚居区，贫民区 | |
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blots
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| 污渍( blot的名词复数 )； 墨水渍； 错事； 污点 | |
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sodden
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| adj.浑身湿透的；v.使浸透；使呆头呆脑 | |
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uncouth
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| adj.无教养的，粗鲁的 | |
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rev
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| v.发动机旋转，加快速度 | |
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reigns
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| n.君主的统治( reign的名词复数 )；君主统治时期；任期；当政期 | |
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supreme
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| adj.极度的，最重要的；至高的，最高的 | |
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mere
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| adj.纯粹的；仅仅，只不过 | |
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dens
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| n.牙齿，齿状部分；兽窝( den的名词复数 )；窝点；休息室；书斋 | |
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decency
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| n.体面，得体，合宜，正派，庄重 | |
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attainment
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| n.达到，到达；［常pl.］成就，造诣 | |
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brutality
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| n.野蛮的行为，残忍，野蛮 | |
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degradation
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| n.降级；低落；退化；陵削；降解；衰变 | |
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prospect
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| n.前景，前途；景色，视野 | |
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vitality
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| n.活力，生命力，效力 | |
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lairs
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| n.（野兽的）巢穴，窝( lair的名词复数 )；（人的）藏身处 | |
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sanitation
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| n.公共卫生，环境卫生，卫生设备 | |
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sleepers
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| n.卧铺（通常以复数形式出现）；卧车( sleeper的名词复数 )；轨枕；睡觉（呈某种状态）的人；小耳环 | |
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35
preyed
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| v.掠食( prey的过去式和过去分词 )；掠食；折磨；（人）靠欺诈为生 | |
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36
miserable
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| adj.悲惨的，痛苦的；可怜的，糟糕的 | |
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swarming
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| 密集( swarm的现在分词 )； 云集； 成群地移动； 蜜蜂或其他飞行昆虫成群地飞来飞去 | |
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38
survivors
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| 幸存者，残存者，生还者( survivor的名词复数 ) | |
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39
misery
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| n.痛苦，苦恼，苦难；悲惨的境遇，贫苦 | |
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40
spacious
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| adj.广阔的，宽敞的 | |
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41
paltry
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| adj.无价值的，微不足道的 | |
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42
doorway
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| n.门口，(喻)入门；门路，途径 | |
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vendor
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| n.卖主；小贩 | |
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magistrate
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| n.地方行政官，地方法官，治安官 | |
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rebuke
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| v.指责，非难，斥责 [反]praise | |
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cub
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| n.幼兽，年轻无经验的人 | |
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preying
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| v.掠食( prey的现在分词 )；掠食；折磨；（人）靠欺诈为生 | |
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48
intelligible
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| adj.可理解的，明白易懂的，清楚的 | |
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bishop
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| n.主教，（国际象棋）象 | |
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50
copper
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| n.铜；铜币；铜器；adj.铜(制)的；(紫)铜色的 | |
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truant
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| n.懒惰鬼，旷课者；adj.偷懒的，旷课的，游荡的；v.偷懒，旷课 | |
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sufficiently
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| adv.足够地，充分地 | |
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maze
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| n.迷宫，八阵图，混乱，迷惑 | |
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brook
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| n.小河，溪；v.忍受，容让 | |
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physically
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| adj.物质上，体格上，身体上，按自然规律 | |
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sanitary
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| adj.卫生方面的，卫生的，清洁的，卫生的 | |
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inspector
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| n.检查员，监察员，视察员 | |
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wink
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| n.眨眼，使眼色，瞬间；v.眨眼，使眼色，闪烁 | |
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proceedings
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| n.进程，过程，议程；诉讼(程序)；公报 | |
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rental
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| n.租赁，出租，出租业 | |
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applied
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| adj.应用的；v.应用，适用 | |
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inmates
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| n.囚犯( inmate的名词复数 ) | |
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juvenile
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| n.青少年，少年读物；adj.青少年的，幼稚的 | |
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offenders
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| n.冒犯者( offender的名词复数 )；犯规者；罪犯；妨害…的人（或事物） | |
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slaughter
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| n.屠杀，屠宰；vt.屠杀，宰杀 | |
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callousness
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