But there is no need further to multiply instances.  In London the slaughter of the innocents goes on on a scale more stupendous than any before in the history of the world.  And equally stupendous is the callousness of the people who believe in Christ, acknowledge God, and go to church regularly on Sunday.  For the rest of the week they riot about on the rents and profits which come to them from the East End stained with the blood of the children.  Also, at times, so peculiarly are they made, they will take half a million of these rents and profits and send it away to educate the black boys of the Soudan.

CHAPTER XXIV—­A VISION OF THE NIGHT

   All these were years ago little red-coloured, pulpy infants, capable
   of being kneaded, baked, into any social form you chose.—­CARLYLE.

Late last night I walked along Commercial Street from Spitalfields to Whitechapel, and still continuing south, down Leman Street to the docks.  And as I walked I smiled at the East End papers, which, filled with civic pride, boastfully proclaim that there is nothing the matter with the East End as a living place for men and women.

It is rather hard to tell a tithe of what I saw.  Much of it is untenable.  But in a general way I may say that I saw a nightmare, a fearful slime that quickened the pavement with life, a mess of unmentionable obscenity that put into eclipse the “nightly horror” of Piccadilly and the Strand.  It was a menagerie of garmented bipeds that looked something like humans and more like beasts, and to complete the picture, brass-buttoned keepers kept order among them when they snarled too fiercely.

I was glad the keepers were there, for I did not have on my “seafaring” clothes, and I was what is called a “mark” for the creatures of prey that prowled up and down.  At times, between keepers, these males looked at me sharply, hungrily, gutter-wolves that they were, and I was afraid of their hands, of their naked hands, as one may be afraid of the paws of a gorilla.  They reminded me of gorillas.  Their bodies were small, ill-shaped, and squat.  There were no swelling muscles, no abundant thews and wide-spreading shoulders.  They exhibited, rather, an elemental economy of nature, such as the cave-men must have exhibited.  But there was strength in those meagre bodies, the ferocious, primordial strength to clutch and gripe and tear and rend.  When they spring upon their human prey they are known even to bend the victim backward and double its body till the back is broken.  They possess neither conscience nor sentiment, and they will kill for a half-sovereign, without fear or favour, if they are given but half a chance.  They are a new species, a breed of city savages.  The streets and houses, alleys and courts, are their hunting grounds.  As valley and mountain are to the natural savage, street and building are valley and mountain to them.  The slum is their jungle, and they live and prey in the jungle.