when the East End was the East End--a land
apart, with laws and customs of its own, cut off from civilization, and
having no common ground with Piccadilly. But the motor-'bus has changed
all that. It has so linked things and places that all individual
character has been swamped in a universal chaos, and there is now
neither East nor West. All lost nooks of London have been dug out and
forced into the traffic line, and boundaries are things which exist
to-day only in the mind of the borough councillor. Hyde Park stretches
to Shadwell, Hampstead to Albert Docks. Soho is _vieux jeu_. Little
Italy is exploded. The Russian and Jewish quarters are growing stale and
commercial, and the London Docks are a region whose chief features are
Cockney warehouse clerks. This corner of Limehouse alone remains
defiantly its Oriental self, no part of London; and I trust that it may
never become popular, for then there will be no spot to which one may
escape from the banalities of the daily day.

But as we stood in the little bedroom of the gentleman from Pi-chi-li
the clock above Millwall Docks shot twelve crashing notes along the
night. The gentleman thrust a moon face through the dusky doorway to
inquire if I had changed my mind. Would myself and honourable companions
smoke, after all? We declined, but he assured me that we should meet
again at Tai-Ling's cafe, and perhaps hospitality....

So we tumbled down the crazy stairs, through the room from which the
Chinks were fast melting, and into the midnight glitter of the endless
East India Dock Road. We passed through streets of dark melancholy,
through labyrinthine passages where the gas-jets spluttered
asthmatically, under weeping railway arches, and at last were free of
the quarter where the cold fatalism of the East combats the wistful
dubiety of the West. But the atmosphere, physical and moral, remained
with us. Not that the yellow men are to blame for this atmosphere. The
evil of the place is rather that of Londoners, and the bitter nightmare
spirit of the place is rather of them than of Asia. I said that there
was little wickedness in Chinatown, but one wickedness there is, which
is never spoken of in published articles; opium seems the only point
that strangers can fasten on. Even if this wickedness were known, I
doubt if it would be mentioned. It concerns.... But I had better not.

We looked back at Barking Road, where it dips and rises with a sweep as
lovely as a flying bird's