d lively it grows.
As you walk along the Strand any time in the afternoon and evening, have
you not seen (to our shame be it said) a sight not visible in the chief
thoroughfare of any other capital in Europe? The sight I allude to is
that of girls, whose profession is but too evident from their appearance,
stopping almost every man they meet, mildly, perhaps, in the early part
of the evening--but, under the influence of drink, with greater rudeness
and freedom as the night wears on. These girls, as you observe, are
dressed in finery hired for the purpose; and following them, as a hawk
its prey, you will perceive at a respectful distance old hags, always
Jewesses, whose business it is to see that these girls do not escape with
their fine dresses, and that they are active in their efforts to entrap
young men void of understanding. Well, these women all live in the
neighbourhood of Catherine-street. What a filthy trade the Jews and
Jewesses of London drive! You may go into Elysiums, and wine-rooms, and
saloons, in this district, and you will find them belonging to Jews--the
waiters Jews--the wine, the women, the cigars, all in the hands of
Jews--true to their ancient vocation of "spoiling the Egyptians." Let me
not be understood as joining in vulgar prejudices against the Jews.
Without reading "Coningsby," or "Lord George Bentinck, a Political
Biography," I am ready to confess that there have been, and still are,
great and gifted men born to the Jewish race; but I am speaking of the
vile crew who earn an infamous livelihood by pandering to all that is
degraded in man or woman--whose vulture eyes follow you up and down
Catherine-street, and who, if they could, would rob you of your last
farthing, and tear off from your back its last rag, and who by fair means
or foul rear up prostitutes, and trade in flesh and blood. But pardon
the digression, and yet not exactly is the subject a digression, when we
remember Catherine-street and its neighbouring courts would be a very
different locality, had not the Jews selected it as a fitting place for
operation. In the days Consule Planco, as Mr Thackeray would write, in
the hot youth of the Regency, before George IV. had become prematurely
used up, and a moral people had erected a statue to the memory of the
most dissolute king in Christendom as a lesson for England's ingenuous
youth and as an example for future royal princes, Catherine-street was
gay indeed, if wine and profliga