more than parody
with her body. Then she pants for breath, exhausted, and stumbles out
through the circle. But the little girls dance on.

The children of the Ghetto possess all the qualities which make for noble
manhood and womanhood; but the Ghetto itself, like an infuriated tigress
turning on its young, turns upon and destroys all these qualities, blots
out the light and laughter, and moulds those it does not kill into sodden
and forlorn creatures, uncouth, degraded, and wretched below the beasts
of the field.

As to the manner in which this is done, I have in previous chapters
described it at length; here let Professor Huxley describe it in brief:-

"Any one who is acquainted with the state of the population of all great
industrial centres, whether in this or other countries, is aware that
amidst a large and increasing body of that population there reigns
supreme . . . that condition which the French call _la misere_, a word
for which I do not think there is any exact English equivalent. It is a
condition in which the food, warmth, and clothing which are necessary for
the mere maintenance of the functions of the body in their normal state
cannot be obtained; in which men, women, and children are forced to crowd
into dens wherein decency is abolished, and the most ordinary conditions
of healthful existence are impossible of attainment; in which the
pleasures within reach are reduced to brutality and drunkenness; in which
the pains accumulate at compound interest in the shape of starvation,
disease, stunted development, and moral degradation; in which the
prospect of even steady and honest industry is a life of unsuccessful
battling with hunger, rounded by a pauper's grave."

In such conditions, the outlook for children is hopeless. They die like
flies, and those that survive, survive because they possess excessive
vitality and a capacity of adaptation to the degradation with which they
are surrounded. They have no home life. In the dens and lairs in which
they live they are exposed to all that is obscene and indecent. And as
their minds are made rotten, so are their bodies made rotten by bad
sanitation, overcrowding, and underfeeding. When a father and mother
live with three or four children in a room where the children take turn
about in sitting up to drive the rats away from the sleepers, when those
children never have enough to eat and are preyed upon and made miserable
and weak by swarming vermin, the