A woman of the lower Ghetto classes is as much the slave of her husband as is the Indian squaw.  And I, for one, were I a woman and had but the two choices, should prefer being a squaw.  The men are economically dependent on their masters, and the women are economically dependent on the men.  The result is, the woman gets the beating the man should give his master, and she can do nothing.  There are the kiddies, and he is the bread-winner, and she dare not send him to jail and leave herself and children to starve.  Evidence to convict can rarely be obtained when such cases come into the courts; as a rule, the trampled wife and mother is weeping and hysterically beseeching the magistrate to let her husband off for the kiddies’ sakes.

The wives become screaming harridans or, broken-spirited and doglike, lose what little decency and self-respect they have remaining over from their maiden days, and all sink together, unheeding, in their degradation and dirt.

Sometimes I become afraid of my own generalizations upon the massed misery of this Ghetto life, and feel that my impressions are exaggerated, that I am too close to the picture and lack perspective.  At such moments I find it well to turn to the testimony of other men to prove to myself that I am not becoming over-wrought and addle-pated.  Frederick Harrison has always struck me as being a level-headed, well-controlled man, and he says:-

To me, at least, it would be enough to condemn modern society as hardly an advance on slavery or serfdom, if the permanent condition of industry were to be that which we behold, that ninety per cent. of the actual producers of wealth have no home that they can call their own beyond the end of the week; have no bit of soil, or so much as a room that belongs to them; have nothing of value of any kind, except as much old furniture as will go into a cart; have the precarious chance of weekly wages, which barely suffice to keep them in health; are housed, for the most part, in places that no man thinks fit for his horse; are separated by so narrow a margin from destitution that a month of bad trade, sickness, or unexpected loss brings them face to face with hunger and pauperism . . .  But below this normal state of the average workman in town and country, there is found the great band of destitute outcasts—­the camp followers of the army of industry—­at least one-tenth the whole proletarian population, whose normal condition is one of sickening wretchedness.  If this is to be the permanent arrangement of modern society, civilization must be held to bring a curse on the great majority of mankind.

Ninety per cent.!  The figures are appalling, yet Mr. Stopford Brooke, after drawing a frightful London picture, finds himself compelled to multiply it by half a million.  Here it is:-