The application of the Golden Rule determines that East London is an unfit place in which to live.  Where you would not have your own babe live, and develop, and gather to itself knowledge of life and the things of life, is not a fit place for the babes of other men to live, and develop, and gather to themselves knowledge of life and the things of life.  It is a simple thing, this Golden Rule, and all that is required.  Political economy and the survival of the fittest can go hang if they say otherwise.  What is not good enough for you is not good enough for other men, and there’s no more to be said.

There are 300,000 people in London, divided into families, that live in one-room tenements.  Far, far more live in two and three rooms and are as badly crowded, regardless of sex, as those that live in one room.  The law demands 400 cubic feet of space for each person.  In army barracks each soldier is allowed 600 cubic feet.  Professor Huxley, at one time himself a medical officer in East London, always held that each person should have 800 cubic feet of space, and that it should be well ventilated with pure air.  Yet in London there are 900,000 people living in less than the 400 cubic feet prescribed by the law.

Mr. Charles Booth, who engaged in a systematic work of years in charting and classifying the toiling city population, estimates that there are 1,800,000 people in London who are poor and very poor.  It is of interest to mark what he terms poor.  By poor he means families which have a total weekly income of from eighteen to twenty-one shillings.  The very poor fall greatly below this standard.

The workers, as a class, are being more and more segregated by their economic masters; and this process, with its jamming and overcrowding, tends not so much toward immorality as unmorality.  Here is an extract from a recent meeting of the London County Council, terse and bald, but with a wealth of horror to be read between the lines:-

Mr. Bruce asked the Chairman of the Public Health Committee whether his attention had been called to a number of cases of serious overcrowding in the East End.  In St. Georges-in-the-East a man and his wife and their family of eight occupied one small room.  This family consisted of five daughters, aged twenty, seventeen, eight, four, and an infant; and three sons, aged fifteen, thirteen, and twelve.  In Whitechapel a man and his wife and their three daughters, aged sixteen, eight, and four, and two sons, aged ten and twelve years, occupied a smaller room.  In Bethnal Green a man and his wife, with four sons, aged twenty-three, twenty-one, nineteen, and sixteen, and two daughters, aged fourteen and seven, were also found in one room.  He asked whether it was not the duty of the various local authorities to prevent such serious overcrowding.

But with 900,000 people actually living under illegal conditions, the authorities have their hands full.