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children dancing in the street when the organ-grinder goes his round. It is
fascinating to watch them, the new-born the next generation, swaying and
stepping, with pretty little mimicries and graceful inventions all their own,
with muscles that move swiftly and easily, and bodies that leap airily,
weaving rhythms never taught in dancing school.
I have talked with these children, here, there, and everywhere,
and they struck me as being bright as other children, and in many ways even
brighter. They have most active little imaginations. Their capacity for
projecting themselves into the realm of romance and fantasy is remarkable. A
joyous life is romping in their blood. They delight in music, and motion, and
color, and very often they betray a startling beauty of face and form under
their filth and rags.
But there is a Pied Piper of London Town who steals them all away.
They disappear. One never sees them again, or anything that suggests them. You
may look for them in vain amongst the generation of grown-ups. Here you will
find stunted forms, ugly faces, and blunt and stolid minds. Grace, beauty,
imagination, all the resiliency of mind and muscle, are gone. Sometimes,
however, you may see a woman, not necessarily old, but twisted and deformed
out of all womanhood, bloated and drunken, lift her draggled skirts and
execute a few grotesque and lumbering steps upon the pavement. It is a hint
that she was once one of those children who danced to the organ-grinder.
Those grotesque and lumbering steps are all that is left of the promise of
childhood. In the befogged recesses of her brain has arisen a fleeting memory
that she was once a girl. The crowd closes in.
Little girls are dancing beside her, about her, with all the pretty graces she
dimly recollects, but can no more than parody with her body. Then she pants
for breath, exhausted, and stumbles out through the circle. But the little
girls dance on.
The children of the Ghetto possess all the qualities which make for noble
manhood and womanhood; but the Ghetto itself, like an infuriated tigress
turning on its young, turns upon and destroys all these qualities, blots out
the light and laughter, and moulds those it does not kill into sodden and
forlorn creatures, uncouth, degraded and wretched below the beasts of the
field.
As to the manner in which this is done, I have in previous chapters described
at length; here let Professor Huxley describe in brief: 'Any one who is
acquainted with the state of the population of all great industrial centres,
whether in this or other countries, is aware that amidst a large and
increasing body of that population there reigns supreme... that condition
which the French call la misere, a word for which I do not think there is any
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exact English equivalent. It is a condition in which the food, warmth, and
clothing which are necessary for the mere maintenance of the functions of the
body in their normal state cannot be obtained; in which men, women, and
children are forced to crowd into dens wherein decency is abolished, and the
most ordinary conditions of healthful existence are impossible of attainment;
in which the pleasures within reach are
reduced to brutality and drunkenness; in which the pains accumulate at
compound interest in the shape of starvation, disease, stunted development,
and moral degradation; in which the prospect of even steady and honest
industry is a life of unsuccessful battling with hunger, rounded by a pauper's
grave.'
In such conditions, the outlook for children is hopeless. They die like flies,
and those that survive, survive because they possess excessive vitality and a
capacity of adaptation to the degradation with which they are surrounded. They
have no home life. In the dens and lairs in which they live they are exposed
to all that is obscene and indecent. And as their minds are made rotten, so
are their bodies made rotten by bad sanitation, overcrowding, and
underfeeding. When a father and mother live with three or four children in a
room where the children take turn about in sitting up to drive the rats away
from the sleepers, when those children never have enough to eat and are preyed
upon and made miserable and weak by swarming vermin, the sort of men and women
the survivors will make can readily be imagined.
Dull despair and misery
Lie about them from their birth;
Ugly curses, uglier mirth, Are their earliest lullaby.
A man and a woman marry and set up housekeeping in one room. Their income does
not increase with the years, though their family does, and the man is
exceedingly lucky if he can keep his health and his job.
A baby comes, and then another. This means that more room should be obtained;
but these little mouths and bodies mean additional expense and make it
absolutely impossible to get more spacious quarters.
More babies come. There is not room in which to turn around. The youngsters
run the streets, and by the time they are twelve or fourteen the room-issue
comes to a head, and out they go on the streets for good. The boy, if he be
lucky, can manage to make the common lodging-houses, and he may have any one
of several ends. But the girl of fourteen or fifteen, forced in this manner to
leave the one room called home, and able to earn at the best a paltry five or
six shillings per week, can have but one end. And the bitter end of that one
end is such as that the woman whose body the police found this morning in a
doorway on Dorset Street, Whitechapel. Homeless, shelterless, sick, with no
one with her in her last hour, she had died in the night of exposure. She was
sixty-two years old and a match
vender. She died as a wild animal dies.
Fresh in my mind is the picture of a boy in the dock of an East
End police court. His head was barely visible above the railing. He was being
proved guilty of stealing two shillings from a woman, which he had spent, not
for candy and cakes and a good time, but for food.
'Why didn't you ask the woman for food?' the magistrate demanded, in a hurt
sort of tone. 'She would surely have given you something to eat.'
'If I 'ad arsked 'er, I'd got locked up for beggin',' was the boy's reply.
The magistrate knitted his brows and accepted the rebuke. Nobody knew the boy,
nor his father or mother. He was without beginning or antecedents, a waif, a
stray, a young cub seeking his food in the jungle of empire, preying upon the
weak and being preyed upon by the strong.
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The people who try to help gather up the Ghetto children and send them away on
a day's outing to the country. They believe that not very many children reach
the age of ten without having had at least one day there. Of this, a writer
says: 'The mental change caused by one day so spent must not be undervalued.
Whatever the circumstances, the children learn the meaning of fields and
woods, so that descriptions of country scenery in the books they read, which
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