hat
prowled up and down. At times, between keepers, these males looked at me
sharply, hungrily, gutter-wolves that they were, and I was afraid of
their hands, of their naked hands, as one may be afraid of the paws of a
gorilla. They reminded me of gorillas. Their bodies were small, ill-
shaped, and squat. There were no swelling muscles, no abundant thews and
wide-spreading shoulders. They exhibited, rather, an elemental economy
of nature, such as the cave-men must have exhibited. But there was
strength in those meagre bodies, the ferocious, primordial strength to
clutch and gripe and tear and rend. When they spring upon their human
prey they are known even to bend the victim backward and double its body
till the back is broken. They possess neither conscience nor sentiment,
and they will kill for a half-sovereign, without fear or favour, if they
are given but half a chance. They are a new species, a breed of city
savages. The streets and houses, alleys and courts, are their hunting
grounds. As valley and mountain are to the natural savage, street and
building are valley and mountain to them. The slum is their jungle, and
they live and prey in the jungle.

The dear soft people of the golden theatres and wonder-mansions of the
West End do not see these creatures, do not dream that they exist. But
they are here, alive, very much alive in their jungle. And woe the day,
when England is fighting in her last trench, and her able-bodied men are
on the firing line! For on that day they will crawl out of their dens
and lairs, and the people of the West End will see them, as the dear soft
aristocrats of Feudal France saw them and asked one another, "Whence came
they?" "Are they men?"

But they were not the only beasts that ranged the menagerie. They were
only here and there, lurking in dark courts and passing like grey shadows
along the walls; but the women from whose rotten loins they spring were
everywhere. They whined insolently, and in maudlin tones begged me for
pennies, and worse. They held carouse in every boozing ken, slatternly,
unkempt, bleary-eyed, and towsled, leering and gibbering, overspilling
with foulness and corruption, and, gone in debauch, sprawling across
benches and bars, unspeakably repulsive, fearful to look upon.

And there were others, strange, weird faces and forms and twisted
monstrosities that shouldered me on every side, inconceivable types of
sodden ugliness, the wrecks of society