This constant selection of the best from the workers has impoverished those who are left, a sadly degraded remainder, for the great part, which, in the Ghetto, sinks to the deepest depths.The wine of life has been drawn off to spill itself in blood and progeny over the rest of the earth.Those that remain are the lees, and they are segregated and steeped in themselves.They become indecent and bestial.When they kill, they kill with their hands, and then stupidly surrender themselves to the executioners.There is no splendid audacity about their transgressions.They gouge a mate with a dull knife, or beat his head in with an iron pot, and then sit down and wait for the police.Wife-beating is the masculine prerogative of matrimony.They wear remarkable boots of brass and iron, and when they have polished off the mother of their children with a black eye or so, they knock her down and proceed to trample her very much as a Western stallion tramples a rattlesnake.
A woman of the lower Ghetto classes is as much the slave of her husband as is the Indian squaw.And I, for one, were I a woman and had but the two choices, should prefer being the squaw.The men are economically dependent on their masters, and the women are economically dependent on the men.The result is, the woman gets the beating the man should give his master, and she can do nothing.
There are the kiddies, and he is the breadwinner, and she dare not send him to jail and leave herself and children to starve.Evidence to convict can rarely be obtained when such cases come into the courts;as a rule the trampled wife and mother is weeping and hysterically beseeching the magistrate to let her husband off for the kiddies'
sakes.
The wives become screaming harridans or broken-spirited and doglike, lose what little decency and self-respect they have remaining over from their maiden days, and all sink together, unheeding, in their degradation and dirt.