The People of the Abyss eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 229 pages of information about The People of the Abyss.

The People of the Abyss eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 229 pages of information about The People of the Abyss.

It is estimated that Kent alone requires eighty thousand of the street people to pick her hops.  And out they come, obedient to the call, which is the call of their bellies and of the lingering dregs of adventure-lust still in them.  Slum, stews, and ghetto pour them forth, and the festering contents of slum, stews, and ghetto are undiminished.  Yet they overrun the country like an army of ghouls, and the country does not want them.  They are out of place.  As they drag their squat, misshapen bodies along the highways and byways, they resemble some vile spawn from underground.  Their very presence, the fact of their existence, is an outrage to the fresh, bright sun and the green and growing things.  The clean, upstanding trees cry shame upon them and their withered crookedness, and their rottenness is a slimy desecration of the sweetness and purity of nature.

Is the picture overdrawn?  It all depends.  For one who sees and thinks life in terms of shares and coupons, it is certainly overdrawn.  But for one who sees and thinks life in terms of manhood and womanhood, it cannot be overdrawn.  Such hordes of beastly wretchedness and inarticulate misery are no compensation for a millionaire brewer who lives in a West End palace, sates himself with the sensuous delights of London’s golden theatres, hobnobs with lordlings and princelings, and is knighted by the king.  Wins his spurs—­God forbid!  In old time the great blonde beasts rode in the battle’s van and won their spurs by cleaving men from pate to chine.  And, after all, it is finer to kill a strong man with a clean-slicing blow of singing steel than to make a beast of him, and of his seed through the generations, by the artful and spidery manipulation of industry and politics.

But to return to the hops.  Here the divorcement from the soil is as apparent as in every other agricultural line in England.  While the manufacture of beer steadily increases, the growth of hops steadily decreases.  In 1835 the acreage under hops was 71,327.  To-day it stands at 48,024, a decrease of 3103 from the acreage of last year.

Small as the acreage is this year, a poor summer and terrible storms reduced the yield.  This misfortune is divided between the people who own hops and the people who pick hops.  The owners perforce must put up with less of the nicer things of life, the pickers with less grub, of which, in the best of times, they never get enough.  For weary weeks headlines like the following have appeared in the London papers.-

   TRAMPS PLENTIFUL, BUT THE HOPS ARE FEW AND NOT YET READY.

Then there have been numberless paragraphs like this:-

Copyrights
Project Gutenberg
The People of the Abyss from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.