DGE

My first impression of East London was naturally a general one. Later
the details began to appear, and here and there in the chaos of misery I
found little spots where a fair measure of happiness reigned--sometimes
whole rows of houses in little out-of-the-way streets, where artisans
dwell and where a rude sort of family life obtains. In the evenings the
men can be seen at the doors, pipes in their mouths and children on their
knees, wives gossiping, and laughter and fun going on. The content of
these people is manifestly great, for, relative to the wretchedness that
encompasses them, they are well off.

But at the best, it is a dull, animal happiness, the content of the full
belly. The dominant note of their lives is materialistic. They are
stupid and heavy, without imagination. The Abyss seems to exude a
stupefying atmosphere of torpor, which wraps about them and deadens them.
Religion passes them by. The Unseen holds for them neither terror nor
delight. They are unaware of the Unseen; and the full belly and the
evening pipe, with their regular "arf an' arf," is all they demand, or
dream of demanding, from existence.

This would not be so bad if it were all; but it is not all. The
satisfied torpor in which they are sunk is the deadly inertia that
precedes dissolution. There is no progress, and with them not to
progress is to fall back and into the Abyss. In their own lives they may
only start to fall, leaving the fall to be completed by their children
and their children's children. Man always gets less than he demands from
life; and so little do they demand, that the less than little they get
cannot save them.

At the best, city life is an unnatural life for the human; but the city
life of London is so utterly unnatural that the average workman or
workwoman cannot stand it. Mind and body are sapped by the undermining
influences ceaselessly at work. Moral and physical stamina are broken,
and the good workman, fresh from the soil, becomes in the first city
generation a poor workman; and by the second city generation, devoid of
push and go and initiative, and actually unable physically to perform the
labour his father did, he is well on the way to the shambles at the
bottom of the Abyss.

If nothing else, the air he breathes, and from which he never escapes, is
sufficient to weaken him mentally and physically, so that he becomes
unable to compete with the fresh virile life from the country haste