This morning, not a hundred yards from where I am myself living, a widow stopped me.  She has six children to support, and the rent of her house was fourteen shillings per week.  She gets her living by letting the house to lodgers and doing a day’s washing or charring.  That woman, with tears in her eyes, told me that the landlord had increased the rent from fourteen shillings to eighteen shillings.  What could the woman do?  There is no accommodation in Stepney.  Every place is taken up and overcrowded.

Class supremacy can rest only on class degradation; and when the workers are segregated in the Ghetto, they cannot escape the consequent degradation.  A short and stunted people is created—­a breed strikingly differentiated from their masters’ breed, a pavement folk, as it were lacking stamina and strength.  The men become caricatures of what physical men ought to be, and their women and children are pale and anaemic, with eyes ringed darkly, who stoop and slouch, and are early twisted out of all shapeliness and beauty.

To make matters worse, the men of the Ghetto are the men who are left—­a deteriorated stock, left to undergo still further deterioration.  For a hundred and fifty years, at least, they have been drained of their best.  The strong men, the men of pluck, initiative, and ambition, have been faring forth to the fresher and freer portions of the globe, to make new lands and nations.  Those who are lacking, the weak of heart and head and hand, as well as the rotten and hopeless, have remained to carry on the breed.  And year by year, in turn, the best they breed are taken from them.  Wherever a man of vigour and stature manages to grow up, he is haled forthwith into the army.  A soldier, as Bernard Shaw has said, “ostensibly a heroic and patriotic defender of his country, is really an unfortunate man driven by destitution to offer himself as food for powder for the sake of regular rations, shelter, and clothing.”

This constant selection of the best from the workers has impoverished those who are left, a sadly degraded remainder, for the great part, which, in the Ghetto, sinks to the deepest depths.  The wine of life has been drawn off to spill itself in blood and progeny over the rest of the earth.  Those that remain are the lees, and they are segregated and steeped in themselves.  They become indecent and bestial.  When they kill, they kill with their hands, and then stupidly surrender themselves to the executioners.  There is no splendid audacity about their transgressions.  They gouge a mate with a dull knife, or beat his head in with an iron pot, and then sit down and wait for the police.  Wife-beating is the masculine prerogative of matrimony.  They wear remarkable boots of brass and iron, and when they have polished off the mother of their children with a black eye or so, they knock her down and proceed to trample her very much as a Western stallion tramples a rattlesnake.