Is it well that while we range with Science, glorying in the time,

City children soak and blacken soul and sense in city slime?

There among the gloomy alleys¹ Progress halts on palsied feet;

Crime and hunger cast out maidens³ by the thousand on the street;

There the master scrimps his haggard seamstress of her daily bread;

There the single sordid⁶ attic⁷ holds the living and the dead;

There the smouldering fire of fever creeps across the rotted floor,

And the crowded couch of incest, in the warrens of the poor.

At one time the nations of Europe confined the undesirable⁸ Jews in city ghettos. But to-day the dominant¹⁰ economic class, by less arbitrary but none the less rigorous methods, has confined the undesirable yet necessary workers into ghettos of remarkable¹¹ meanness and vastness. East London is such a ghetto⁹, where the rich and the powerful do not dwell, and the traveller cometh not, and where two million workers swarm¹², procreate, and die.

It must not be supposed that all the workers of London are crowded into the East End, but the tide is setting strongly in that direction. The poor quarters of the city proper are constantly being destroyed, and the main stream of the unhoused is toward the east. In the last twelve years, one district, “London over the Border,” as it is called, which lies well beyond Aldgate, Whitechapel, and Mile End, has increased 260,000, or over sixty per cent. The churches in this district, by the way, can seat but one in every thirty-seven of the added population.

The City of Dreadful Monotony, the East End is often called, especially by well-fed, optimistic sightseers, who look over the surface of things and are merely shocked by the intolerable sameness and meanness of it all. If the East End is

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