horrors. In this they got a single room at a cruel rent,
and work was more difficult for them to get now, as they
came from a place of such bad repute, and they fell into
the hands of those who sweat the last drop out of man and
woman and child, for wages which are the food only of
despair. And the darkness and the dirt, the bad food and
the sickness, and the want of water was worse than before;
and the crowd and the companionship of the court robbed
them of the last shreds of self-respect. The drink demon
seized upon them. Of course there was a public house at
both ends of the court. There they fled, one and all, for
shelter, and warmth, and society, and forgetfulness. And
they came out in deeper debt, with inflamed senses and burn
ing brains, and an unsatisfied craving for drink they would
do anything to satiate. And in a few months the father
was in prison, the wife dying, the son a criminal, and the
daughters on the street. Multiply tJiis by half a million,
and yon will be beneath the trntJi.

No more dreary spectacle can be found on this
earth than the whole of the awful East, with its
Whitechapel, Hoxton, Spitalfields, Bethnal Green,
and Wapping to the East India Docks. The color
of life is gray and drab. Everything is helpless,
hopeless, unrelieved, and dirty. Bath-tubs are a
thing totally unknown, as mythical as the ambrosia
of the gods. The people themselves are dirty, while
any attempt at cleanliness becomes howling farce,
when it is not pitiful and tragic. Strange, vagrant
odors come drifting along the greasy wind, and the
rain, when it falls, is more like grease than water

[[227]]

p226 _ -chap- _ toc-1 _ p227w _ toc-2 _ +chap+ _ p228

v?