It should be called The City
of Degradation.

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 900,000 people living
in less than the 400 cubic feet prescribed by the law.

Mr. Charles Booth, who engaged in a systematic work of years in charting
and classifying the toiling city population, estimates that there are
1,800,000 people in London who are _poor_ and _very poor_. It is of
interest to mark what he terms poor. By _poor_ he means families w