k; it is a sad
burden which we lay upon posterity if we do not continually spend our
utmost in lifting them up. Why, we have been the best part of two
thousand years in recovering the civilization which fell to pieces
when the Roman Empire decayed. We have not been fifty years in
dragging up the very poor whom we neglected and left to themselves,
the gallows, the cat, and the press-gang only a hundred years ago. And
how slow, how slow and sometimes hopeless, is the work!

The establishment of river police and the construction of docks have
cleared the river of all this gentry. Ships now enter the docks; there
discharge and receive; the labourers can carry away nothing through
the dock-gates. No apron allows a bag to be hidden; policemen stand at
the gates to search the men; the old game is gone--what is left is a
surviving spirit of lawlessness; the herding together; the
hand-to-mouth life; the love of drink as the chief attainable
pleasure; the absence of conscience and responsibility; and the old
brutality.

What the riverside then was may be learned by a small piece of
Rotherhithe in which the old things still linger. Small
repairing-docks, each capable of holding one vessel, are dotted along
the street; to each are its great dock-gates, keeping out the high
tide, and the quays and the shops and the caretaker's lodge; the ship
lies in the dock shored up by timbers on either side, and the workmen
are hammering, caulking, painting, and scraping the wooden hull; her
bowsprit and her figurehead stick out over the street, Between the
docks are small two-storied houses, half of them little shops trying
to sell something; the public-house is frequent, but the 'Humours' of
Ratcliff Highway are absent; mercantile Jack at Rotherhithe is mostly
Norwegian and has morals of his own. Such, however, as this little
village of Rotherhithe is, so were 'Wappin in the Wose,' Shadwell,
Ratcliff, and the 'Limehouse' a hundred years ago, with the addition
of street fighting and brawling all day long; the perpetual adoration
of rum, quarrels over stolen goods; quarrels over drunken drabs;
quarrels over all-fours; the scraping of fiddles from every
public-house, the noise of singing, feasting, and dancing, and a
never-ending, still-beginning debauch, all hushed and quiet--as birds
cower in the hedge at sight of the kestrel--when the press-gang swept
down the narrow streets and carried off the lads, unwilling to leave
the girls and the gro