While it is not a city of slums, as some people imagine, it may well be said to be one gigantic slum.From the standpoint of simple decency and clean manhood and womanhood, any mean street, of all its mean streets, is a slum.Where sights and sounds abound which neither you nor I would care to have our children see and hear is a place where no man's children should live, and see and hear.Where you and I would not care to have our wives pass their lives is a place where no other man's wife should have to pass her life.For here, in the East End, the obscenities and brute vulgarities of life are rampant.
There is no privacy.The bad corrupts the good, and all fester together.Innocent childhood is sweet and beautiful; but in East London innocence is a fleeting thing, and you must catch them before they crawl out of the cradle, or you will find the very babes as unholily wise as you.
The application of the Golden Rule determines that East London is an unfit place in which to live.Where you would not have your own babe live, and develop, and gather to itself knowledge of life and the things of life, is not a fit place for the babes of other men to live, and develop, and gather to themselves knowledge of life and the things of life.It is a simple thing, this Golden Rule, and all that is required.Political economy and the survival of the fittest can go hang if they say otherwise.What is not good enough for you is not good enough for other men, and there's no more to be said.
There are 300,000 people in London, divided into families, that live in one-room tenements.Far, far more live in two and three rooms and are as badly crowded, regardless of sex, as those that live in one room.The law demands 400 cubic feet of space for each person.In army barracks each soldier is allowed 600 cubic feet.Professor Huxley, at one time himself a medical officer in East London, always held that each person should have 800 cubic feet of space, and that it should be well ventilated with pure air.Yet in London there are 900,000people living in less than the 400 cubic feet prescribed by the law.