i842 AMONG THE POOR IN EAST END 17 



likely to forget so long as memory holds — a visit to a sick girl 

 in a wrfttched garret where two or three other women, one a 

 deformed woman, sister of my patient, were busy shirt-making. 

 After due examination, even my small medical knowledge suf- 

 ficed to show that my patient was merely in want of some better 

 food than the bread and bad tea on which these people were 

 living. I said so as gently as I could, and the sister turned 

 upon me with a kind of choking passion. Pulling out of her 

 pocket a iew pence and halfpence, and holding them out, " That 

 is all I get for six and thirty hours' work, and you talk about 

 giving her proper food." 



Well, I left that to pursue my medical studies, and it so hap- 

 pened the shortest way between the school which I attended 

 and the library of the College of Surgeons, where my spare 

 hours were largely spent, lay through certain courts and alleys, 

 Vinegar Yard and others, which are now nothing like what they 

 were then. Nobody would have found robbing me a profitable 

 employment in those days, and I used to walk through these 

 wretched dens without let or hindrance. Alleys nine or ten feet 

 wide, I suppose, with tall houses full of squalid drunken men 

 and women, and the pavement strewed with still more squalid 

 children. The place of air was taken by a steam of filthy ex- 

 halations; and the only relief to the general dull apathy was a 

 roar of words — filthy and brutal beyond imagination — between 

 the closed-packed neighbours, occasionally ending in a general 

 row. All this almost within hearing of the traffic of the Strand, 

 within easy reach of the wealth and plenty of the city. 



I used to wonder sometimes why these people did not sally 

 forth in mass and get a few hours' eating and drinking and 

 plunder to their hearts' content, before the police could stop 

 and hang a few of them. But the poor wretches had not the 

 heart even for that. As a slight, wiry Liverpool detective once 

 said to me when I asked him how it was he managed to deal 

 with such hulking ruffians as we were among, " Lord bless you, 

 sir, drink and disease leave nothing in them." 



This early contact wfth the sternest facts of the social 

 problem impressed him profoundly. And though not ac- 

 tively employed in what is generally called " philanthropy," 

 still he did his part, hopefully but soberly, 'not only to 

 throw light on the true issues and to strip away make- 

 believe' from them, but also to bring knowledge to the 

 working classes, and to institute machinery by which ca- 



