<h2>CHAPTER XXIV—A VISION OF THE NIGHT</h2>
<blockquote><p>All these were years ago little red-coloured, pulpy infants,
capable of being kneaded, baked, into any social form you chose.—CARLYLE.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Late last night I walked along Commercial Street from Spitalfields
to Whitechapel, and still continuing south, down Leman Street to the
docks. And as I walked I smiled at the East End papers, which,
filled with civic pride, boastfully proclaim that there is nothing the
matter with the East End as a living place for men and women.</p>
<p>It is rather hard to tell a tithe of what I saw. Much of it
is untenable. But in a general way I may say that I saw a nightmare,
a fearful slime that quickened the pavement with life, a mess of unmentionable
obscenity that put into eclipse the “nightly horror” of
Piccadilly and the Strand. It <i>was</i> a menagerie of garmented
bipeds that looked something like humans and more like beasts, and to
complete the picture, brass-buttoned keepers kept order among them when
they snarled too fiercely.</p>
<p>I was glad the keepers were there, for I did not have on my “seafaring”
clothes, and I was what is called a “mark” for the creatures
of prey that prowled up and down. At times, between keepers, these
males looked at me sharply, hungrily, gutter-wolves that they were,
and I was afraid of their hands, of their naked hands, as one may be
afraid of the paws of a gorilla. They reminded me of gorillas.
Their bodies were small, ill-shaped, and squat. There were no
swelling muscles, no abundant thews and wide-spreading shoulders.
They exhibited, rather, an elemental economy of nature, such as the
cave-men must have exhibited. But there was strength in those
meagre bodies, the ferocious, primordial strength to clutch and gripe
and tear and rend. When they spring upon their human prey they
are known even to bend the victim backward and double its body till
the back is broken. They possess neither conscience nor sentiment,
and they will kill for a half-sovereign, without fear or favour, if
they are given but half a chance. They are a new species, a breed
of city savages. The streets and houses, alleys and courts, are
their hunting grounds. As valley and mountain are to the natural
savage, street and building are valley and mountain to them. The
slum is their jungle, and they live and prey in the jungle.</p>
<p>The dear soft people of the golden theatres and wonder-mansions of
the West End do not see these creatures, do not dream that they exist.
But they are here, alive, very much alive in their jungle. And
woe the day, when England is fighting in her last trench, and her able-bodied
men are on the firing line! For on that day they will crawl out
of their dens and lairs, and the people of the West End will see them,
as the dear soft aristocrats of Feudal France saw them and asked one
another, “Whence came they?” “Are they men?”</p>
<p>But they were not the only beasts that ranged the menagerie.
They were only here and there, lurking in dark courts and passing like
grey shadows along the walls; but the women from whose rotten loins
they spring were everywhere. They whined insolently, and in maudlin
tones begged me for pennies, and worse. They held carouse in every
boozing ken, slatternly, unkempt, bleary-eyed, and towsled, leering
and gibbering, overspilling with foulness and corruption, and, gone
in debauch, sprawling across benches and bars, unspeakably repulsive,
fearful to look upon.</p>
<p>And there were others, strange, weird faces and forms and twisted
monstrosities that shouldered me on every side, inconceivable types
of sodden ugliness, the wrecks of society, the perambulating carcasses,
the living deaths—women, blasted by disease and drink till their
shame brought not tuppence in the open mart; and men, in fantastic rags,
wrenched by hardship and exposure out of all semblance of men, their
faces in a perpetual writhe of pain, grinning idiotically, shambling
like apes, dying with every step they took and each breath they drew.
And there were young girls, of eighteen and twenty, with trim bodies
and faces yet untouched with twist and bloat, who had fetched the bottom
of the Abyss plump, in one swift fall. And I remember a lad of
fourteen, and one of six or seven, white-faced and sickly, homeless,
the pair of them, who sat upon the pavement with their backs against
a railing and watched it all.</p>
<p>The unfit and the unneeded! Industry does not clamour for them.
There are no jobs going begging through lack of men and women.
The dockers crowd at the entrance gate, and curse and turn away when
the foreman does not give them a call. The engineers who have
work pay six shillings a week to their brother engineers who can find
nothing to do; 514,000 textile workers oppose a resolution condemning
the employment of children under fifteen. Women, and plenty to
spare, are found to toil under the sweat-shop masters for tenpence a
day of fourteen hours. Alfred Freeman crawls to muddy death because
he loses his job. Ellen Hughes Hunt prefers Regent’s Canal
to Islington Workhouse. Frank Cavilla cuts the throats of his
wife and children because he cannot find work enough to give them food
and shelter.</p>
<p>The unfit and the unneeded! The miserable and despised and
forgotten, dying in the social shambles. The progeny of prostitution—of
the prostitution of men and women and children, of flesh and blood,
and sparkle and spirit; in brief, the prostitution of labour.
If this is the best that civilisation can do for the human, then give
us howling and naked savagery. Far better to be a people of the
wilderness and desert, of the cave and the squatting-place, than to
be a people of the machine and the Abyss.</p>
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