rave drink, who are overworked, exhausted, suffering
from deranged stomachs and bad sanitation, and deadened by the ugliness
and monotony of existence, but the gregarious men and women who have no
home-life flee to the bright and clattering public-house in a vain
attempt to express their gregariousness. And when a family is housed in
one small room, home-life is impossible.

A brief examination of such a dwelling will serve to bring to light one
important cause of drunkenness. Here the family arises in the morning,
dresses, and makes its toilet, father, mother, sons, and daughters, and
in the same room, shoulder to shoulder (for the room is small), the wife
and mother cooks the breakfast. And in the same room, heavy and
sickening with the exhalations of their packed bodies throughout the
night, that breakfast is eaten. The father goes to work, the elder
children go to school or into the street, and the mother remains with her
crawling, toddling youngsters to do her housework--still in the same
room. Here she washes the clothes, filling the pent space with soapsuds
and the smell of dirty clothes, and overhead she hangs the wet linen to
dry.

Here, in the evening, amid the manifold smells of the day, the family
goes to its virtuous couch. That is to say, as many as possible pile
into the one bed (if bed they have), and the surplus turns in on the
floor. And this is the round of their existence, month after month, year
after year, for they never get a vacation save when they are evicted.
When a child dies, and some are always bound to die, since fifty-five per
cent. of the East End children die before they are five years old, the
body is laid out in the same room. And if they are very poor, it is kept
for some time until they can bury it. During the day it lies on the bed;
during the night, when the living take the bed, the dead occupies the
table, from which, in the morning, when the dead is put back into the
bed, they eat their breakfast. Sometimes the body is placed on the shelf
which serves as a pantry for their food. Only a couple of weeks ago, an
East End woman was in trouble, because, in this fashion, being unable to
bury it, she had kept her dead child three weeks.

Now such a room as I have described is not home but horror; and the men
and women who flee away from it to the public-house are to be pitied, not
blamed. There are 300,000 people, in London, divided into families that
live in single rooms,