PERILS. — THE CITY. 183 



Her husband, who was a cabman, had shortly before 

 committed suicide. ... In another apartment, nine 

 brothers and sisters, from twenty-nine years of age 

 downward, hve, eat, and sleep togetlier. Here is a 

 mother who turns her children into the street in the 

 early evening, because she lets her room for inmioral 

 purposes until long after midnight, when the poor little 

 wretches creep back again, if they have not found some 

 miserable shelter elsewhere. Where there are beds, 

 they are simply heaps of dirty rags, shavings, or straw ; 

 but for the most part these miserable beings find rest 

 only upon the filthy boards. . , . There are men 

 and women who lie and die, day by day, in their 

 wretched single room, sharing all the family trouble, 

 enduring the hunger and the cold, and waiting, without 

 hope, without a single ray of comfort, until God curtains 

 their staring eyes with the merciful film of death." ^ 

 Says the writer: "So far from making the most of our 

 facts for the purpose of appealing to emotion, we have 

 been compelled to tone down everything, and wholly to 

 omit what most needs to be known, or the ears and eyes 

 of our readers would have been insufferably outraged. 

 Inde(3d, no respectable printer would print, and certainly 

 no decent family would admit, even the driest statement 

 of the horrors and infamies discovered in one brief visit- 

 ation from house to house." Such are the conditions 

 under which many tens of thousands live in London. 

 So much space is given to this picture, only because 

 London is a future New York, or Brooklyn, or Chicago. 

 It gives a very dim impression of what may exist in a 

 great city side by side with enormous wealth. Is it 

 strange that such conditions arouse a blind and bitter 

 hatred of our social system? 



Socialism centers in the city, and the materials of its 

 growth are multiplied with the growth of the city. 

 Here is heaped the social dynamite ; here roughs, gam- 

 blers, thieves, robbers, lawless and desperate men of all 



1 The Bitter Cry of Outcast London, pp. 3, 4, 10. 



