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 woman do? There is no accommodation in Stepney.Every place is taken up and overcrowded.
Class supremacy can rest only on class degradation; and when the workers are segregated in the Ghetto, they cannot escape the consequent degradation.A short and stunted people is created,- a breed strikingly differentiated from their masters' breed, a pavement folk, as it were, lacking stamina and strength.The men become caricatures of what physical men ought to be, and their women and children are pale and anaemic, with eyes ringed darkly, who stoop and slouch, and are early twisted out of all shapeliness and beauty.
To make matters worse, the men of the Ghetto are the men who are left, a deteriorated stock left to undergo still further deterioration.For a hundred and fifty years, at least, they have been drained of their best.The strong men, the men of pluck, initiative, and ambition, have been faring forth to the fresher and freer portions of the globe, to make new lands and nations.Those who are lacking, the weak of heart and head and hand, as well as the rotten and hopeless, have remained to carry on the breed.And year by year, in turn, the best they breed are taken from them.Wherever a man of vigor and stature manages to grow up, he is haled forthwith into the army.Asoldier, as Bernard Shaw has said, 'ostensibly a heroic and patriotic defender of his country, is really an unfortunate man driven by destitution to offer himself as food for powder for the sake of regular rations, shelter, and clothing.'