This Ghetto crowding is not through inclination,
but compulsion. Nearly fifty per cent of the workers
pay from one-fourth to one-half of their earnings for
rent. The average rent in the larger part of the
East End is from $1.00 to $1.50 per week for one
room, while skilled mechanics, earning $8.75 per
week, are forced to part with $3.75 of it for two or
three pokey little dens, in which they strive desper
ately to obtain some semblance of home life. And
rents are going up all the time. In one street in
Stepney the increase in only two years has been
from $3.25 to $4.50; in another street from $2.75 to
$4; and in another street, from $2.75 to $3.75;
while in Whitechapel, two-room houses that re
cently rented for $2.50 are now costing $5.25.
East, west, north, and south, the rents are going
up. When land is worth from $100,000 to $150,000
an acre, some one must pay the landlord.

Mr. W. C. Steadman, in the House of Commons,
in a speech concerning his constituency in Stepney,
related the following:

This morning, not a hundred yards from where I am
myself living, a widow stopped me. She has six children
to support, and the rent of her house was 14 shillings per
week. She gets her living by letting the house to lodgers
and doing a day s washing or charing. That woman, with
tears in her eyes, told me that the landlord had increased
the rent from 14 shillings to 18 shillings. What could the

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v?