ing hopeful,
enterprising, ill-advised people with a few score or hundreds of
pounds, slowly, inevitably into broken-hearted failures. It is, to my
mind, the crudest aspect of our economic struggle. In the little High
Street of Sandgate, over which my house looks, I should say between a
quarter and a third of the shops are such downward channels from
decency to despair; they are sanctioned, inevitable citizen breakers.
Now it is a couple of old servants opening a "fancy" shop or a tobacco
shop, now it is a young couple plunging into the haberdashery, now it
is a new butcher or a new fishmonger or a grocer. This perpetual
procession of bankruptcies has made me lately shun that
pleasant-looking street, that in my unthinking days I walked through
cheerfully enough. The doomed victims have a way of coming to the
doors at first and looking out politely and hopefully. There is a rich
and lucrative business done by certain wholesale firms in starting the
small dealer in almost every branch of retail trade; they fit up his
shop, stock him, take his one or two hundred pounds and give him
credit for forty or fifty. The rest of his story is an impossible
struggle to pay rent and get that debt down. Things go on for a time
quite bravely. I go furtively and examine the goods in the window,
with a dim hope that this time something really will come off; I learn
reluctantly from my wife that they are no better than any one else's,
and rather dearer than those of the one or two solid and persistent
shops that do the steady business of the place. Perhaps I see the new
people going to church once or twice very respectably, as I set out
for a Sunday walk, and if they are a young couple the husband usually
wears a silk hat. Presently the stock in the window begins to
deteriorate in quantity and quality, and then I know that credit is
tightening. The proprietor no longer comes to the door, and his first
bright confidence is gone. He regards one now through the darkling
panes with a gloomy animosity. He suspects one all too truly of
dealing with the "Stores." ... Then suddenly he has gone; the savings
are gone, and the shop--like a hungry maw--waits for a new victim.
There is the simple common tragedy of the little shop; the landlord of
the house has _his_ money all right, the ground landlord has, of
course, every penny of his money, the kindly wholesalers are well out
of it, and the young couple or the old people, as the case may be, are
loo