Chapter XIX

The Ghetto

it is well -- why this one??

>>>>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 alleys Progress halts on palsied feet,
>>>>Crime and hunger cast our maidens by the thousand on the street;
>>>>
>>>>There the master scrimps his haggard seamstress of her daily bread;
>>>>There a single sordid attic 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.
>>>>-- Tennyson

At one time the nations of Europe confined the
undesirable Jews in city ghettos. But to-day the
dominant economic class, by less arbitrary but none
the less rigorous methods, has confined the undesir
able yet necessary workers into ghettos of remarka
ble meanness and vastness. East London is such
a ghetto, where the rich and the powerful do not
dwell, and the traveller cometh not, and where
two million workers swarm, 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

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v?